California is crumbling, socially. Have you seen the homelessness epidemic from San Fransisco and everywhere south? I work in a lucrative upper engineering management role and still cannot afford to buy a house... That's not really an indicator of a healthy state.
Then ask for a raise. Two people making $140k should easily be able to save up $400k in 5-8 years for a mortgage down payment. And single people don't need an entire house.
Should just move to somewhere in Montana with fiber. Buy a house with a forest attached to it and only one person need to work making $100K to live the same life.
The downside being lack of good sushi restaurants anywhere near, but ones got to make choices.
Clearly you've never tried to purchase real estate in the Bay or done the math. $140k after taxes is more like 90k, and then rent eats up $25k of that alone. Subtract another $25k for living expenses (food, insurance, car, etc.) and you're left with 40k, which realistically you'd be dumping into a retirement fund. 2 bedroom house in a decent location with decent schools costs well over $1.5M, plus the insane property taxes due to Prop 13., and you need to pay cash or you won't win the bidding wars.
In states with functioning real estate markets, a decent house in a decent location costs $700k tops and you don't pay $3-4k/mo in rent for a shitty, tiny apartment next to a homeless encampment. My friend rents a highrise penthouse in Chicago for the same price as a 1930s 3bd apartment in SF.
Is the housing market in the Bay area really uniquely dysfunctional? High property prices are a result of demand outstripping supply. It's what you get for concentrating the entire tech industry in one place. Similar to Manhattan and the financial industry.
In that regard, the real estate market in the Bay area is basically working as intended. Or am I missing something?
By functioning, I mean markets where the local property owners haven't colluded to restrict supply via bullshit environmental assays, zoning, etc. Or at least they haven't sufficiently colluded to the level of straight up preventing new housing from being built.
Yep, recently moved to California from the Midwest and I am regretting not moving earlier. Its been 3 months but I am still blow. Away by how amazing everything. Sure, it's expensive, but you get what you pay for.
There is no real evidence for the idea that a difference in scores predicts a difference in performance, once you are above some threshold.
They should keep the test, but use a threshold (per major and school) with a lottery for everyone above the threshold. And admit a small number below at random to keep evaluating what the threshold should be.
I don't understand why lottery are used so much in official context. Instead of the best, you select randomly and hoping RNGesus is on your side. I agree about the threshold, but how about using other criterias instead of RNG.
You mean like, read the student's application and use critical thinking to evaluate whether they're a good fit for the school based on their essays and individual accomplishments? Say it ain't so!
When you admit as many students as a UC, you can easily run regressions to determine whether a particular admissions officer is being discriminatory. They should also be able to anonymize applicants pretty well.
They should be able to--that doesn't mean they want to know the answer. It's very obvious they want to discriminate but not be detected doing so. They're not going to run those regressions and they aren't going to anonymize.
One advantage of lotteries is that they remove competition and 'arms races', since there's no way to affect the outcome (ideally; modulo hacking, etc.). Once you're over the threshold, you might as well focus your remaining time and effort on other things; rather than spending more money on 'interview technique coaching', or hiring more proof-readers, or rephrasing the same sentence over and over for months in an attempt to get it 'perfect'.
Not only do lotteries mitigate Goodhart's Law (which rewards 'bad' candidates who appear good, whilst punishing 'good' candidates who don't appear that way); but even a perfect, un-gameable measure can waste resources chasing diminishing returns. Even something as trivial as spelling mistakes can be decisive; and whilst those judging might only care a little about spelling, candidates care a lot about winning, so it's in their interest to obsess over even such minor things.
This imposes a massive opportunity cost, whether it's spending whole childhoods in 'cram schools'; or university salaries going to 'grant proposal writing services' rather than educators and researchers; etc.
> There is no real evidence for the idea that a difference in scores predicts a difference in performance,
Except for the gigantic study commissioned by the UC system the article references?
“ Second, while high-school GPA has been found to be more predictive of success at college than standardized test scores at some schools, the exact opposite turns out to be true for students at UC schools. There, standardized test scores say more about which applicants are likely to earn a degree and to do it in less than eight years; they also correlate strongly with students’ GPA at the university.”
> Here are some more of the fiercely held arguments for dumping the tests: Test scores don’t reflect the character-forging aspects of life as a poor teenager; the tests force students from underfunded schools to compete against “affluent whites” who can afford expensive test prep;
While the article does offer some rebuttal to that claim, I'd like to give a stronger one*: California is 31% white, University of California students are 25% white - they are underrepresented.
I'm not following how that's a stronger rebuttal than the one in the article:
> But white students are also underrepresented, if only ever so slightly, at the UC: They make up 21 percent of the undergraduate population and 22 percent of K–12 schoolchildren.
If we're talking about college admissions, I think the percentage of white K-12 students is more important than the percentage of white people of any age. Obviously, some people start attending college later in life, but that number isn't high enough to make the demographics of the general population more important than the demographics of K-12 students.
Im kinda curious what exact "character-forging aspects of life as a poor teenager" lead to not just better school outcomes but better life outcomes in general?
The only thing that comes to mind is possibly empathy towards the less fortunate, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to result in better life outcomes for a person in our modern society. But let me stress "possibly" because there seems to be plenty of examples of people who dont have any kind of empathy towards others who grew up as poor teenagers.
Thomas Sowell is easily in the top 5 intellectuals alive, and yet most people are barely aware of him and his work. Why? I genuinely don't understand why he is so ignored.
Clarence Thomas' skin color is irrelevant. He believes the US should be a Gilead as much as the Taliban wants to turn Afghanistan into an Islamic nation: Christian state religion, no abortions, women and children as property, patriarchy, women at-home/barefoot/pregnant, no porn, no LGBT rights, no accommodations for disabilities, no dancing, no premarital sex, no divorces, criminalize adultery, decriminalize sexual harassment (irony!), no welfare except for the rich, no unions, and only teach abstinence and Creationism.
Thomas isn't just ignored, he is actively campaigned against (As a person, rather than his views) and 'unpersoned'. For example, there is a wonderful PBS documentary, Clarence Thomas in his own words, that was removed from Amazon Prime TV during Black History month at a time the company chose to 'center' black voices.
Apparently only black voices with the correct political leanings.
Love him or hate him, I highly recommend the documentary. It's very humanizing.
Would someone who is downvote-burying these comments care to explain their distaste? Irrespective of whether you agree with Sowell's viewpoints, they are articulate and seem germane to the conversation.
The distaste is a black man who is a republican. That is all there is to it. Ask any non-white republican, and you will understand. The hate dished out towards us is on a level white republicans never see (not that they should... it's absolutely ridiculous). Accusations of 'Uncle Tom', 'race traitor', etc are common. When the various racial groups organize anywhere, and you volunteer your time with them, they silence you, get rid of you, and prevent you from speaking up elsewhere.
He's extreme far right wing, especially compared to other parties in the USA, which tend to be right wing and moderate-right compared to those in Europe, where the terms originated.
So, data-driven, factual research is the domain of the extreme far right wing these days? I mean, I knew the left was illogical, irrational, and irresponsible, but didn't realize leftists were admitting it.
> He's a moderate classical liberal, which is generally described as a centrist position.
Organizations like the Hoover love to present this as such, but there is a reason why the departments just 100 or so feet away don't interface with them - and it isn't because they are centrists.
The documentary Uncle Tom talks about the active work the press and educational circles do to suppress Thomas Sowell's work. His data-driven research and conclusions counter leftist educational and media institutions, and those institutions see Sowell as a threat to their power base. In other words, follow the money.
"The Hoover Institution, officially the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, is a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government."
Not surprisingly, Sowell's article is against affirmative action.
While I was reading it, I was also looking out for anything that might distinguish Sowell as one of "the top 5 intellectuals alive" and saw absolutely nothing. It just seemed like another random article with absolutely nothing special about it.
If there is some evidence that he's so brilliant, it'd be great if someone could point it out.
I don't see how taking more advanced classes and scoring well is "gaming" your GPA. You are legitimately taking harder / more in depth classes and performing well. The fact that your GPA is higher as a result seems legitimate.
You can argue about availability of AP classes / funding / etc, but that doesn't detract from the hard work of the AP students. Plenty of rich white kids take hard AP classes and get D's.
In some schools, so I understand, AP and Honors courses come with a "bonus" to GPA—so if you get 100% in the course, it may go down on your transcript as a 110%, that sort of thing.
My school had a pretty good system, where AP grades got a boost proportional to how far from 100 they were, something like 40%, so if you got an 80 raw it would be boosted by 20x.4 = 8 to 88 final score. This effectively means that weaker students aren't penalized for chosing harder classes whilst very strong students don't get rediculously inflated grades.
It's not gaming, per se, but it definitely is a privilege based thing.
Getting into an advanced class generally means you already know the material that would be in the normal class (taking trig the year everyone else is taking geometry, for instance). How did you get to where you already knew that material? Well, you were either in the advanced class the year before, or, you already learned the material outside of class. How did you already learn the material outside of class? Better education at home. Which is easy to do with a private tutor or stay at home parent; really hard to do with a single parent, or dual income that don't allow for much in education expenses.
And because you are in an advanced class, you basically get a .5-1.0 bump to your GPA (so people are graduating with a 4.5 GPA at some schools), all because you had the extra early resources; you can't compete with just what the school provides.
No. I am explicitly pointing out that even if you learn everything taught in class 100%, and get perfect grades in it, you may not be eligible for some advanced classes. It requires outside investment. And then the advanced classes give you a leg up in terms of college admissions if GPA is a guaranteed entry point.
That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves as an indirect proxy for money, rather than a reasonable consideration for class performance, knowledge, aptitude, or any such thing.
Yeah, if kids all have equal time outside of school (because poor kids have the same workloads at home as rich kids), equal access to resources (because poor kids have equal access to computers and internet access as rich kids), and we're relying solely on the kids motivation (rather than parents who can supply time to engage with their kids education, unlike the kids whose parents are working multiple jobs just to make ends meet).
If all that's true, then yeah, it's just the kids' choice of how they spend their time and effort, and NOT a proxy for wealth. But I don't think all of that is true.
So if you engage in more and better education, above and beyond the education that one is engaging in school, then that person will be better at education?
Yes, of course.
Just like if someone practices basketball, outside of their school team, and hires a basketball tutor, then they would become better at basketball.
Obviously, if someone spends more of their own time on something, anything, whether it is education, or basketball, or whatever, then they would become better at that thing.
The only question now, is why would that possibly surprise you, that people who go above and beyond whatever everyone else is doing, would become better than everyone else at that thing?
> That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves as an indirect proxy for money,
So you think poor people just don't work hard enough? Only rich people care about their future and are willing to put in the effort to better themselves?
Sounds like some conservative propaganda to me....
Gaming implies that your metrics are being ruined by moving towards an opposite effect, not that they fail to be perfect. Similarly, doing well in the IMO could be a predictor of wealth and circumstance, but it's also a signal for math talent.
If we're saying that AP tests and classes are too easy, then of course people can have a discussion about increasing difficulty.
All I know is there are trivial AP classes like AP Government, AP Econ, AP Art, AP Computer Science, etc. at my school. Almost everyone got an A and a 4 or 5 on the test.
In 2021, Under 50% of students got a 4/5 on compsci, econ (both of them), gov, and Art. The only thing which can charitably be included is AP drawing, which about 52% got a 4 or above. The high scores in your classes have more to do with school quality than anything else.
And as a result, the person who took more Honors classes will be "more educated" (assuming the Honors / AP classes succeed in their stated goal). Therefore, the student that took the Honors classes is more competitive.
It comes back to the question of what universities should prioritize. Should they be optimizing for the fairest / most equal student body, or the most gifted / competitive student body?
More educated and more competitive are not the same thing.
What you want is the most talented, hardest working, brightest students. That's difficult to discern given the differences in the availability of opportunity. Scaling for availability is hard.
But it is clear that just selecting for the students who succeeded in the best environment will leave you missing out on potential. And worse, that rapidly becomes self-reinforcing, since the next generation of students will be influenced by your choices on this one.
Even when parents are paying for the lesson, it's still the student that has to do the hard work. But a student with less help deserves more merit for achieving the same.
Well, I graduated from TJ this year (2021) and it wasn’t very common for people to have a 4.5+. Yes, some, but not the average by any stretch - average was probably a 4.2, or a 4.3.
in california the top X% of all public high schools are guaranteed a berth at SOME UC, so to some degree intra-school comparisons are less at issue. (parent article is about the UC system as a whole).
> People in power today would much rather do something that seems to promote “equity” than make an evidence-based choice that could lead to accusations of racism.
"Wokeness" and CRT are steps back in logical and rational discussion. Sometimes the truth hurts, and instead of plugging our ears, shouting "LALALALALA", and denigrating the purveyors of said truth, we should accept the truth for what it is and look to the underlying causes.
The modern western allopathic medicine treat-the-symptoms-with-drugs school of thought pervades more than just healthcare.
I think the University of Texas has one of simplest and most egalitarian admissions policies that I have seen. If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities.
As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California.
If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT admission policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases) then I would be curious to hear.
Yeah I wanted to point this out. In Texas it is the top 10% for every public university except the University of Texas at Austin which varies the percentage from year to year depending on the expected number of applicants. 6% is the lowest I have seen it. I believe it was 8% the year I was accepted.
All system can be gamed. I guess UT isn't that prestigious to create strong enough incentives. Imagine if Harvard said you'd get admission if you're top 1% of the class. Imagine how many parent would just stick their kid into the worst school for 1-2 years to get that.
That wouldn't be a good thing? Students are assigned to schools based on their address. To put their kid in a bad school would require moving into a bad neighborhood. That means the poor town gets more tax money, which all the students benefit from.
The overwhelming majority of towns do not impose an income tax and presumably the property tax would be the same regardless of whether a "typical" or "college admissions gaming" resident lived there. The only small difference in tax income to the town would be any minuscule difference in excise taxes on vehicles or local sales tax. Do you have a larger difference in tax income to the town in mind that I'm not seeing?
Well, UC doesn't consider your skin color in said evaluation (the evaluation criteria is constructed in a weigh that does boost racial diversity, but that's different from considering at the individual criteria), and it has similar gaming dynamics.
As the article notes, you absolutely can go to a weaker high school to boost your chance into a UC (parents can also try dropping their income lower to boost their kids as well). Though, neither might not be a good strategy for the long-run anyway.
Consider there is a major difference in purpose between a State and private educational institution. Prestige is hardly relevant in my view--the purpose is to efficiently allocate state taxpayer resources for the public good of state citizens at UT, as it should be for UC. Harvard and prestige are two tangential things.
UT Austin is one of the most prestigious public universities in the nation, the Texas equivalent to UC Berkeley. Texas just strictly limits how many from out of state can come (also, in state tuition is only $5000/semester, so it heavily incentives even the wealthy / those who can achieve a Harvard or, say, Pomona College admission to attend). Full disclosure: I did not attend UT Austin.
Also. as someone who grew up in Texas and now lives in California, I can tell you the UT System has more than its fair share of gaming attempts -- as such, you're ineligible for the automatic-in based on rankings if you switch schools in the last 2 years (i.e. you need to get in holistically), and those who attend private high schools also need to get in holistically (because top private schools got caught saying more than 7% of their students were in the top 7% and have non-state-standardized ranking criteria). Granted, being automatically admitted to one of the UT schools via rankings often does _not_ mean admission to UT Austin, but rather a satellite campus.
What's wrong with that? That'll encourage education-focused parents to move to more diverse neighborhoods. Right now parents are trying to cram into the 3-4 best school districts in any given area.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth my U.S. state tried to stem the brain drain to out-of-state universities. They offered big money scholarships to anybody who graduated in their school's top ten. The higher the rank, the more money.
This was pre-internet, but people still tracked rankings across the state. One kid would transfer schools to bump their rank two spots. That would cascade to a flurry of transfers. All the top students knew where their GPA would place them in every other high school in the state and everybody was watching for movement. Eventually, they capped the program to be based on your rank midway through senior year to prevent 100s of transfers in the last month of the school year before graduation. Which of course, just moved the activity to the last month in the semester before the last semester before graduation. But then you had to maintain your GPA in the new school for a whole semester, so it involved more risk.
Now that I've told this whole story, let me say that none of it is true. Or, at least, I don't really know how much of it is true. I do know that it was the buzz among students when I was in school. I never entered that world very deeply. I'm pretty sure that it did happen a bit. Probably not as much as it was talked about.
In my experience the more common narrative was gaming the system to keep your GPA high. AP/DC/Advanced classes are typically shifted a GPA point up.
For example, you may not take an elective (Photography) because getting the top grade in the class would still drop your overall GPA. Despite Spanish being available in middle school, our valedictorian waited until high school because it would count a point higher -- by the time you realize how to play the game, it might be too late.
The other example cited was kids attending a very competitive school up until their senior year and then moving to a less competitive school and graduating a higher rank.
My favorite example of this is a CISCO/networking class offered at my old high school.
It counted as 2 classes when it came to calculating your GPA...and accordingly was supposed to take up 2 "slots" on your schedule. However it didn't and instead the 2nd slot was always after school, which nobody went to anyways. So it allowed you to fit N+1 AP classes into what would normally be a N class schedule and gave a major advantage when calculating class rank.
As a result you got some very interesting people taking this class who you would never expect, simply to boost their class rank. It saddens me a little now to realize that these kids schedules were planned out from the beginning from fall freshman year to optimize their GPA...but I went to a very competitive school so in retrospect it makes sense.
Bonus, to your point they offered ap options for most arts and electives! You could take AP photography or "honors" art/music which counted as an AP for weighted gpa calculations :P
In our school district they have multiple tiers: normal classes, honor classes, AP classes, college classes. It amuses me that AP classes are weighted higher than college classes. That is, it would just amuse me if it didn't affect my children.
So students can take a college class, get an A, and receive college credit. Or they can take an AP class, get an A, then take an exam that might determine whether they get college credit. Why take an AP English class when you could just take College Freshman English? Because the AP class will be better for your GPA.
I get to see first hand when advisers are sticking a kid in an AP Government class that is completely pointless instead of the Honors Biology class for GPA reasons. Never mind that the kid wants to be a botonist or marine biologist or anesthesiologist. We don't have room for that. We have to maximize their GPA. Stick them in AP English instead of normal Stats even if they could be in Stats and normal English and are more interested in Stats.
If your kid didn't take the Honors Ag class as a freshman, they're already mathematically eliminated. They will never recover the additional 0.025 point GPA advantage. There are only 64 academic slots available in a four year schedule. There are are 32 highest weighted classes, 16 mid-weights, and 24 low-weights. Only four of those can be taken as a freshman. If you miss just one opportunity, you're out.
So you have a 4.0/4.0 GPA, 4.625/4.75 weighted GPA, and a class ranking of 53.
And hopefully a support group that helped you understand and choose what is most important in life.
Sounds like my school district. Freshman were technically banned from taking AP classes (but of course, some parents spoke to the school and thus they were allowed in). And naturally the valedictorian 3 years later was one of the 4 that was able to get into an AP class freshman year.
I always felt quite vindicated when I got my class rank (8/432) even though I had a "normal" schedule. 0, 3, 6, 7 APs. I even took a free period and only had 6 classes junior year as opposed to the normal 7!
I had a similar situation at my school where I was valedictorian because there are 2 Latin language APs vs. only 1 for most of the other foreign languages.
Try living in a rural area where some kid took all 5 AP classes offered, and all 8 Honors classes. They've been #1 throughout high school. Then somebody moves in from a school that offered more than 5 AP classes. Suddenly the kid who did everything possible didn't do enough.
Or the student who was tied for #1 when the school decided they wouldn't accept ties. So they did pole vault scoring and reached back to kindergarten to see who got the first B.
In academics as in sports and all other pursuits, sometimes you just have to be satisfied with excellence regardless of trophies.
I think it would incentivize making sure your lower ranked peers stay in school to pad out the ranking more than sabotage. IDK how you would even sabotage effectively, but I can think of a lot of ways to help your peers stay in school.
I think a lot of the meme form of 'conservative' and 'liberal' concepts OFTEN don't fit if you define it by politics or a state policy... especially any policy as time goes on.
A state government might have a very liberal or conservative party in power ... and a given policy might be considered the opposite, but they're not going to revisit it all the time.
The reasons for the policy too might have nothing to do with 'conservative' and 'liberal'.
Personally, I'm not really sure I buy into the idea that any given University has to have a given admissions policy and be 'liberal' or 'conservative'. There's room for a mix of policies across universities IMO / should be a mix.
Fankly I think you could tell most people any random policy is 'conservative' or 'liberal' and they'd just support or oppose it based on that label.
Definitions are all dorked up... and 'conservative' and 'liberal' is too weird and narrow a lens to view everything through.
Just as an example George W. Bush ran a campaign that very vocally opposed "nation building", it was thought to be a very important conservative value. George W. Bush then started the largest / longest nation building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan in decades ...
These terms often don't make any sense when applied.
TBF, I think when OP was talking about "conservative" vs "liberal" s/he was more less talking about progressive vs regressive systems.
A regressive system takes away from those that don't have much to give to people that already have a lot.
In this way - a blanket statement of guaranteeing the top x% of students admission into state schools is - I would argue fair and reasonable - but I would also argue is regressive.
This is assuming the top x% of students come from wealthier & more educated families. It's possible this assumption isn't true.
I think progressive policies would be like those that make it easier for certain groups to get admitted (i.e. harder for other groups). This seems unfair, but if you want change, I don't see how you do it fairly.
Affirmative action is a shortcut, but sometimes the shortcut is the only way to make any progress.
There may be a few very large issues, but also a gazillion small factors that make up systemic discrimination, both racially and against women. It is impossible for minorities to fight those individually, especially not from a position of weakness. It is more effective to counter at least a small part of the net discriminative effect by relatively simple quotas.
And usually those policies don't make up the balance anyway.
I'm dubious that economic standing isn't a better criteria than race in most situations where affirmative action would be desirable.
Providing programs to help those in a weaker economic position more directly addresses the need, results in programs that everyone can feel that maybe they or their family might benefit from, and avoids perpetuating raced based discrimination and the resulting resentment.
If when economic equality isn't the inequality you're attempting to correct it's so highly correlated that it should be sufficient-- after all, a big part about why we care about the lasting effects of historic racism is that it has produced a lasting weakened economic standing.
i think what your comment aludes to, and is an important point that gets lost easily is, concentrating on race masks the real issue which is systemic economic and opportunity disparity
The downside of that system is that the 10% at one school is definitely not equivalent to the top 10% in another school. When you compare rural school districts to the suburbs of the major cities a kid in the top 10 people at one school might not even rank in the top quarter at another school.
You're losing the forest for the trees. Wealthier parents most often send their children to good private schools, and their children have lots of options for college if they are talented and hard working.
That's a hell of an indictment of the local schools. Where I live (Portland, Oregon suburbs) most middle/upper middle class families send their kids to public school.
Eh, kids from rich/educated families probably get a much smaller marginal benefit from the quality of the school since they're getting tons of extra stimulation at home (stability, parents reading to them at night, parents encouraging academic pursuits). Meanwhile lower-achieving kids benefit just from having the higher-achieving kids in the same classroom.
This is in fact exactly what happens in Texas. I've met many people who attended UT whose parents or friend's parents did exactly that for the explicit purpose of increasing their chances of their child being in the top 7% of their graduating class so that they could get automatic admission to UT Austin, a very good school to attend compared to the usual options for someone graduaitng #35 in a class of 500 from a public high school with low educational achievement rankings.
They'll often go straight for petroleum engineering if their career path is as calculated during college as it was in high school, and end up with a six figure salaxy at age 22 (not sure this still works as of 2020 given the problems with Houston's gas sector).
For some parents, making sure their child has a sure fire path to the middle class is what they consider their main responsibility, and will do things as crazy as move to a worse school district just to get them on the above track.
If you're as cynical about the value of education (to provide a "job") as the people described, you'll absolutely sacrifice the quality of your kids education (moving to a school with ostensibly less talented or credentialed teachers and possibly less academically gifted peers to learn from and larger class sizes) in order to game the system.
Well, assuming this also moves funding this may actually do wonders for balancing out the system. And there may be some benefits to all the students, in seeing how the other half lives, making more advanced classes available in poorer neighborhoods, etc.
They can, but they don't, just like how Jeff Bezos can choose to live under a bridge, but doesn't.
Nobody with money goes out of their way to send their children to a school in a 'common' part of town, because they don't want their children to mix up with 'the wrong kind' of people.
If you ever find a case of a wealthy family moving to a rural area to improve their children's chances of getting into a state school, please let us know.
I went to high school in a science magnet program in Texas. Students from 3 high schools were eligible for the magnet program, and the magnet program was housed in one of the 3 high schools. Our math+science classes were in the magnet program, but our English/history/PE/art/all other classes were in the host school. The program made up about 10% of the host high scool, and students in the program were counted as part of the host school for purposes of university admission.
This understandably made people unhappy at the host school - ~7% of the class is academic high achievers from out of the school zone who take most of the admission spots reserved for the top N%.
I don't know of any cases of parents moving to avoid the extra competition, but I probably wouldn't have heard of that if it happened. I do know of some people set on going to UT who did not apply to the magnet program so they could have less competition.
The point here is you don't need to move to a rural area to decrease school competition. There are plenty of cases where you can move a mile to get into the zone of a less competitive school.
You are making an implicit assumption that groups should be treated equitably. Some of us disagree with that--we feel *individuals* should be treated equitably and see these attempts to treat groups equitably as treating individuals *inequitably*.
Why should my chance of getting into college be hampered by where my parents live or what color skin they gave me??
Aiding one person is inherently discriminating against another.
It's all a hack job to try and work around the fact that we haven't yet figured out a good objective measurement. Things like SAT do the same in reverse, aid the wealthy students at the expense of the poor ones. It's not an easy problem.
The top 10 percent policy is a merit based system and the most recent flavor of "progressivism" says that merit based systems are racist and should be abolished. Lottery and quota based admissions is what considered progressive today.
Lottery systems with an initial cutoff make sense if you have a large surplus of applicants who surpass your lower quality threshold. Rather than make asinine minuscule decisions over who exactly the top 1,526 out of 10,000 are, cull the 7,234 that don’t make the cut and randomly select from the survivors.
The entire point is that you set the initial cutoff such that the differences in “pure merit” between your threshold and the lowest candidate if you went anal-retentive on ranking do not translate into meaningfully different outcomes.
It's top 7% now and it has a holistic system to handle students outside that cohort.
The reason this exists is that it's effectively an affirmative action program for both urban segregated schools and rural schools, which combined have enough political power to pull this off. I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this to be constructed - note that suburbs in general fight against such policies.
UT itself generally doesn't like the state mandated policy because it results in a less academically strong cohort than other flagship universities, reducing its rank.
Whether one school's admission program is "better" or not depends on what you view as the purpose of universities (something often lost in these conversations). Are you weighing more academically similar cohort (in which case purely predictive measures of performance are most appropriate) or some sort of equity metric where putting students from less socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds with stronger ones can result in higher upward mobility? One can certainly make the case that the Texan system could be failing on both accounts compared to say UCs, but you'd need to try to build a causal model to understand which school is producing better results for students that arrive.
Do universities exist for students? Or do students exist for universities?
I'm sure university administration believe the latter, but given that they're supported by the state (in UT's case, ~25% of their budget?) there's a pretty strong argument that they owe the people of the state education.
University Presidents and Trustees have this bizarre fixation on rankings. I have no clue why, especially considering the fact that that composition of the top 100 is fairly stable. Rarely does a university experience a big swing, up or down. Most universities are never going to dethrone the top 20, no matter how hard they try. And it's not like they are in desperate need for enrollment either.
Because we put MBA’s in leadership positions of universities so they do what they’ve been trained to do - run a business. And part of that is finding metrics to measure their success by.
I expect it's a case of metrics-measured, metrics-optimized-for.
Rankings are an easy "objective" measurement administrators can take to financial supporters (either government or private) and say "Here's what we're spending your dollars on." Consequently, rankings become very important to administrators.
There was a stretch in my life where I knew a lot of people who knew where George Washington University ranked versus Carleton College versus who knows what. The upper middle classes take this stuff seriously.
When people hear about a university they don't know about, they often get their initial impressions from the rankings. I imagine universities that fail that test can end up being filtered out very early on in the process. For some people anything top 20 is great, but I think even the top universities don't want to be written off by the best candidates because they were #11 instead of #10.
It’s not really bizarre at all. Parents and therefore students care about rankings, and it directly leads to enrollment, donations, and talent attraction. There might not be changes in overall rankings but individual college or program rankings do change substantially.
The administration will all profess a desire not to be so beholden but it’s part of the game so to speak, you have to play.
Source: current board member of a public university college
Agreed, but that argument is more relevant to argue along the lines of how many in-state vs. out-of-state/international students you can educate. (Even then it's murky -- I can argue the international students both bring additional funding and add diversity which improves the learning experiences of in-state students).
Regardless, the argument here is simply which people they select. Assuming they hold 90% of spots for Texans (required by law), it's just a question of how they select people. The university wants to select the strongest students holistically (which some additional diversification criteria) - the state wants it to select the top 7% of students from every high school. Even if you argue the people are owed a state education, either criterion is a valid way to select the students that attend.
now you are starting to ask extremely uncomfortable questions for the higher education cabal.
Unfortunately, what I suspect is going on with all this high minded "get rid of the SATs" is really going to at least help the universities combat what was an increasing pressure to do pre and post testing to validate or establish the value of a university's program. You cannot as easily gain useful information if you have no pre-test.
The very irony of this is of course that it is a kind of deliberate and manipulative breaking of the scientific process by universities who will simply claim even more profusely that their graduates improve over 4 years of study, without any control of variables.
The only possibility I see to circumvent what may be a devious scheme is for citizens to press state Legislatures to require a pre-test on entry and a post-test on graduation. Expect extreme pushback though because the data that is available strongly indicates that universities are largely not actually conferring the value one may expect. In other words, the quality of the students on entry is the primary determination of the quality of the student on graduation, which seems to hold across the board.
High calibre students not only help the university's rankings, but also other students. A few of my courses had absolutely terrible lecturers, but we managed to more or less learn the material from each other.
I had a girlfriend at U C Davis, and I found the opposite.
The best students were called 4clickers. They sat in the front row, with four color pens in hand.
They never helped, and one on occasion turned her in for cheating. She used to talk about how competitive thstudrnts were. They all wanted a spot in a graduate program. It was the most depressing school I ever visited. Couldn't wait to leave on Sunday. (I was suprised she cheated, but it taught me something about "the high caliber" student.)
Yeah it really depends on the students' objectives/options. For Electrical/Computer Engineering majors at my University we all knew we were all going to at least get decent jobs at graduation, those going to Grad school were the minority. So it was a very collegial atmosphere for the most part.
But if you're in one of those programs where the Undergrad is fairly worthless by itself and are competing for a limited number of slots at a prestigious grad program, that's when then cutthroats start to emerge.
Sometimes the _professors_ would get sick of the shit the competitive students spread over the class. Nothing quite as satisfactory as watching the lights go out when a pre-med’s career prospects get ranked over a B in organic chemistry. Leave the professor’s attention for those of us who are here to learn, not for those who merely want to collect As.
> I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this to be constructed
I believe california has a similar program (or did at some time since Bakke), specifically for UC (the "higher tier" university system, versus cal state system)
Yes and there are definitely CS schools which IMO are better than many UC (cal poly SLO e.g.)
And what is the "top" UC anyways. This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I personally think more favorably of UCSD over cal, and, for some disciplines Davis or SC over cal. UCLA is highly regarded across the board and probably exceeds cal, for, say pre-nursing program.
I am a Texas resident (born here and also graduated from high school in Texas) and would like to point out that it's not just UT, every state school (the other big ones with a decent amount of competition are Texas Tech and Texas A&M) follows this policy. In actuality, it appears that because the demand is so high for UT they have had to lower the number to 6%: https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/
The primary flip side to the top 10% law is that urban centers have much higher levels of competition than rural ones. If you happen to go to high school in Nowhere, Texas, it's quite easy to go to UT since achieving that top 6% is a somewhat trivial endeavor. Whereas if you go to an urban high school in a population center such as Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, you have to really apply yourself.
Because on average the children of urban/suburban professionals have more academic support, higher expectations placed on them, and more competition, and as a result end up with more academic practice/preparation, compared to rural or working-class children.
You're saying it would be easier if you imported the support and expectations with you? Otherwise I still don't get it. If rural school students as a class are poorly supported and have low expectations, and you are a member of that class, I don't see where your advantage arises.
The same amount of effort spent on academic pursuits (or the same amount of external support) will get you further on a local–relative scale in a less competitive environment. Even the 75th %ile students at many schools filled with children of upper-middle-class professionals work insanely hard. But sure, being one of the few academic strivers in a less competitive school has its own challenges.
I think making the system more equitable by supporting kids from all backgrounds is socially beneficial, even if it sometimes makes suburbanites complain.
I think he's saying if you're in a bad urban school, it's hard to see how you're any less likely to be in the top 6% than if you're in a bad rural school given the same academic abilities. (Academic abilities which don't always need to be very highly developed.)
A typical rural school attracts students based on proximity---if you're living in that district, you go to that school, no matter how much your parents make or whether they're lawyers or a convenience store clerk. (Additionally, the residents of the area are typically less interested in education, rather than getting a job or playing sports.)
In an urban area, residential areas are typically segregated by wealth, and wealthier parents want their kids to go to good schools. Further, they are capable of moving within the area so that their children go to good schools. As a result, the competition among students for the top N% more fierce due to the pre-selection of students.
I think you mean if you go to a good school you need to apply yourself. If you live in a rough neighborhood and go to a bad school, it's not really all that difficult. Of course, you have to get through high school, which is not so easy in the rough neighborhoods. But you get the idea.
The problem arises when most of them want to attend UT-Austin rather than UT-El Paso or UT-Permian Basin or UT-Rio Grande. And as noted by others the threshold had to be revised downwards from 10%. I personally believe you can receive an excellent education from most institutions but there's prestige associated with UT-Austin that isn't with the satellite campuses.
Well, there are problems with that right out of the gate.
* Consider a family where the highschool student has to work to help out with rent and food bills, so they miss school or don't have time to work on assignments. Compare this to a wealthier family where the student has all the free time in the world.
* Or consider a district that skews wealthier and tutors push the haves up into the 10%, and push the have nots below. Plenty of the have nots would have hit the 10% threshold if only they had money.
* Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities.
These are just a few I've read about off the top of my head. The idea of standardized testing is fair, but only if it is aware of inequities in the system. This has been a debate since the 70's. In fact, the popular TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" did an episode about systemic racism in standardized testing the early 1980's.
I'm not arguing if Cali has it right or wrong, but there are problems with using just testing.
IMHO you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good by pointing out situations the 10% (now 6% apparently) rule doesn't cover.
Second, you are not offering an alternative solution that would be preferable.
Also, you are not recognizing that fixing in the top 6% is not a requirement for admission so it is possible for the situations you list to be addressed.
Finally you end with an argument against standardized testing which has nothing to do with the comment you are replying to. In fact the 6% policy allows a student to get into the university without ever taking a standardized test.
You're describing certain individuals who might suffer from such an arrangement, but what's the opportunity cost here? If you will make a different arrangement, different people will suffer from it. I'm not convinced that there's a scenario where nobody at all gets hurt so I don't believe that listing a few examples of some people getting the short end of the stick in itself warrants outright rejecting this approach.
> Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities
For example these people by your own definition will be rare. They might also be disadvantaged in other ways should they live elsewhere, which means that that the same person in two different places would simply face a different set of disadvantages which might even themselves out. Likewise "a district that skews wealthier" should naturally have fewer "have-nots" than other districts so "have-nots" themselves would not be disadvantaged on average.
What your scenarios describe are students who are not ready / prepared to do as well as their peers in college.
You cannot resolve prior inequities by forcing students into college- they drop out at higher rates, with higher (unforgivable!) debts, and word of mouth of their experiences will continue to deter others from trying.
I personally witnessed this happen to friends I had made my freshman year at school.
The ACT in particular has a really low bar for anyone who does reasonably well in school- most state schools around here had a minimum score that certainly required no preparation to achieve.
Yep. Packing unprepared students in based on non-merit items (including legacy) and disadvantaging prepared students is absolutely ridiculous. It's bad enough that the standards are low for student athletes because it's all about talent-recruitment business and NCAA $$$, where educational attainment is tertiary.
Some schools are actually quite good at ensuring student athletes need to actually be students in addition to athletes. The necessary discipline to simultaneously train in rigorous athletics and scholarship can make for a compelling case.
Alas, my alma mater did not, and it was pretty obvious to everyone that they were athletes first, and kept up appearances about schooling. I am reasonably confident that several degree programs that the school offered would not have existed if the football and basketball programs didn't exist.
Would they have been able to let in more students who would have bean more focused on schooling? Honestly, I don't know, but I strongly suspect there are lower hanging fruit to pick first.
I'd point out that this only guarantees you admission into the general studies / undeclared school. It can still be difficult and competitive to get into the engineering or business school for example.
A law was passed in 2009 for the University of Texas specifically, that stated "the university must automatically admit enough students to fill 75 percent of available Texas resident spaces" [1]. That 10% number has dwindled down to the top 6%.
As a past automatic admission, I'm horrified hearing stories from coworkers. The process was never stressful for me -- I sent in one application, heard back before the holidays and was done.
At the time I entered UT Austin, in 1986, they had that 10% policy---it's how I got in. Some programs (nursing and business are the two I remember) had competitive admissions, though, but that was for sophomores or juniors.
The University had 50,000 students at that time. During my time there, they were constantly trying to find a way to reduce that number and succeeded at some point, so the 2009 law may have been a result.
>> As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California.
There isn't much that is progressive about property taxes. They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates).
Texas specifically has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, and that's in part because we have no income tax. Income taxes, though, are actually progressive.
Note that Texas's high property tax rates is one of the significant contributors to gentrification.
But to me is the largest issue is funding for public schools and quality. At one time you would leave high-school with an education that was similar to what you get now in a 4 year college.
These days all we are doing is running a kind-of day care until the public school student leaves to work at McDonalds in the afternoon once the School Day ends.
I also remember some Profs saying in many cases, the first year of collage is a re-education of what the student should already know.
> They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates)
Absolutely not. The burden of property taxes falls largely on the capitalized asset-value of real estate, so a typical middle-class household can offset much of that burden by paying for a smaller mortgage in the first place. And poor renters largely benefit by not having to pay local income or sales taxes, since the burden of the tax will fall on their landlords. Property taxes are in fact quite progressive.
Property taxes are fundamentally regressive because if two individuals in the same tax jurisdiction live in properties with the same values, they pay the same amount of property tax, regardless of their incomes. That's the literal distinction between progressive and regressive taxation. The fact that the middle class household can offset the burden by getting a smaller place is quite irrelevant.
In addition, it's erroneous to think that property taxes are shouldered by landlords. They are, in fact, passed on to renters.
I'm from Texas, went to UT when it had the 10% rule. It was a problem for kids who went to competitive/affluent schools that were so competitive that one or two Bs would put you out of the running. So you would get some lopsided scenarios where some kids would get into MIT but also be rejected from Texas because the standards were that high. Meanwhile the valedictorian of a bad school with a 900 SAT score would get in. Some kids would move to less competitive high schools to have a chance at going to UT.
The high school I went to was public but it had 15 perfect SAT scores in my grade, numerous full rides to Harvard, and such. Good luck with getting into the top 10% of that.
A fairer way would be to rank the top 10% of students statewide by SAT/ACT and GPA.
> If you graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, then you are guaranteed admission to all state funded universities.
UC is the more elite of two separate state funded university systems in CA, but it has a similar guarantee (but not campus-of-choice), that evaluates earlier (counts only 10th and 11th grade) and has a 9% cutoff for the “in your class” guarantee, which is called “Eligibility in Local Context”.
California State University, the larger state-funded system, has a process called “redirection” which functions as a kind of admission guarantee for qualified California residents who are applying as first-time freshman or certain transfer statuses, but I can’t easily find clear documentation of the cutoff (which may just be the minimum CSU eligibility cutoffs), but in any case is broader than UCs.
I'm not convinced that Texas is more progressive here. (Even before considering the sibling comments that indicate that the actual current guarantee is less than the top 10%.)
Right, but the campus of choice difference is huge!
The UC system includes schools like UC Merced which just aren't that competitive or prestigious to begin with, just as the UT system includes schools that are much less competitive/prestigious than UT Austin.
Maybe an unpopular perspective, but IMO its not that hard to be top 10% even with people gaming grades. Source: went to one of the top public high schools in Texas, graduated top 1%, am not that smart and didn't go to any great lengths for school. I payed attention in class, did (most of) the homework, and reviewed for final exams.
The reason being that US conservatism is often a more egalitarian branch of liberalism. In states like California and New York, they're animated by a more hierarchical and traditional type of (small-r) republican politics in which they cultivate client groups which they support through direct cash payments and favored policies.
In California the worthies are untitled hereditary aristocrats who secure political power by accumulating and supporting vast client populations. These clients vote for the aristocratic party and provide it with a patina of moral justification. It is an intensely traditional political form that can be found in other societies going back thousands of years. These aristocrats in turn ensure that big corporate interests get favored tax treatment (often effectively zero tax) while preventing small business competition through hyper regulation. BigCo gets subsidized and pays zero tax, LilCo gets hit with endless demands for paperwork and fines. You can find similar social forms in many societies throughout history: it's not special or unique.
California has an even better program. If you go to a California community college and have a 2.7 GPA you are guaranteed admission to a CA State University.
Just want to point out that the policy you're referring to was put in place while Democrats ran Texas. Historically Texas was a Democratic state, with only eight years of Republican governors from 1874-1995.
> more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California
And also that California was historically a Republican state. For most of the years from 1943-1999, they had a Republican governor.
Note that until recently, there was little correlation between the progressive/conservative axis and the Democratic/Republican axis. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to the downfall of the Dixiecrat faction of the Democratic party and the current ideological sort. Ezra Klein's book "Why We're Polarized" has a lot of good background on this.
I went to UT and having this program in was a great experience. It allowed for a lot of variety and kids from all sorts of backgrounds, but you still had crazy smart people. If you're from the city, the school's super hard to get into. I don't know about the more suburban or rural areas. That being said, my classmates were very diverse and it was a blast. CS education was phenomenal there and I still think their approach puts them in the best of the best globally. Everything else was really nice too, can't have asked for a better experience.
The problem I see with that is that, if you are rich enough to game the system that way, you are probably rich enough to be gaming the system in order to get your kids into something other than a state school.
Unless we involve football, for example. Sports break the model.
"As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California."
While I (as a graduate of UT Austin) agree with most of your comment, I would like to know why you believe Texas' tax policies are progressive?
(Texas does not have an income tax, but does have (very high) property taxes. A resident of Texas with a large income but a small real-estate footprint pays relatively few taxes (which is why many wealthy individuals choose Texas as their state of residence) while an average homeowner, whose house is the largest asset, pays a greater relative tax rate.)
I'm skeptical of how egalitarian the top 6% (for UT Austin) policy actually is. All this does is guarantee you admission to the university, not a specific major. So, while you can gain admission easily to a liberal arts major, you aren't guaranteed admission to a STEM major and will still have to be a competitive applicant to gain admission into a STEM major.
> If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT admission policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases) then I would be curious to hear.
Texan here. I'll share my story, at risk of coming across as big headed: I feel the 7% percent policy unfairly shut me out of a "better" school. I can't tell if it negatively or positively impacted my career. It either allowed me to focus more on becoming a better programmer (going to an easier school); or it made me lag in my career 1-2 years (not being able to go from a top school directly into FAANG/a SV startup).
For my first 1-2 years of HS, I had a somewhat challenging personal life and didn't take any advanced courses. It wasn't until the 3rd year I stepped up in every way possible, taking all AP courses, and getting 4-5s in 8 AP tests by graduation. I don't recall what my GPA was, but thanks to my false start it didn't meet the threshold, and I attribute being not accepted to UT to the fewer spots available due to the 7% rule.
( an aside, I'm still baffled at how this happened. By all accounts I was overqualified: won a regional UIL CS championship, had multiple gaming projects, knew multiple programming languages. There's a larger critique here about how the hell colleges determine admissions. I assume the quantitative, filterable metrics like GPA precluded anyone of importance from reading any of my qualitative attributes )
GPA is something you can game, and people in my school did. For example, the two highest level math courses you can take in HS is Calculus AB and Calculus BC–the former covers half a year of college-level math, and the latter covers a full year, both over the course of senior year. I chose BC due to an interest in math. Many others chose AB simply because they would both be weighted the same in GPA calculations, and clearly AB would be easier. The result is that the BC class had a dozen students and AB had 30. By informal surveying, the highest ranking students in the graduating class took AB, not BC. This is just one example: there are other ways a students can reduce how much they learn in favor of a higher GPA. I absolutely do not regret taking BC, it was the best part of my HS education. It's a shame it possibly harmed my college admissions.
In the end, I was rejected from my first choice (UT Austin), was accepted to University of Houston on a half-free ride, but was very disillusioned with the quality of their CS program during my entire tenure. I landed in a subpar job right out of college, and after a year at a software consulting firm for the oil industry I managed to get myself to Silicon Valley (after throwing a hail mary and moving to Seattle without a job–and then using a connection to a friend I met in Calculus BC to get a referral at a startup), where my career really started. In hindsight it was just a year or two, and perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but I think the admissions process at UT really failed to identify me as a worthy entrant, and I think the 7% rule exacerbated this. I used to be salty about this (in college / in my subpar job), but now I don't give it any thought.
I count myself lucky because, like many in this field, I was motivated to develop my programming skills outside school. Perhaps going to a weaker CS college allowed me to focus more on skills more relevant to software engineering (I even had time to consult in college).
For many people, finishing in the top of your class in highschool is challenging if you are capable but have had a relaitively difficult home life -- it requires broad spectrum high performance across years. Getting a good score on a single test is more achievable for some.
Now imagine the situation for a student with a poor family who finds themselves in a school mostly with students from wealthy families? The "top-%" metric would doubly harm them.
On the plus side, at least the top-% metric provides an incentive for students to attend 'worse' schools, which to the extent that students are benefited by mixing with more capable students, could help everyone.
The author doesn't spend much time arguing why the tests should be kept. This is one defense and it feels pretty weak to me:
> standardized test scores say more about which applicants are likely to earn a degree and to do it in less than eight years; they also correlate strongly with students’ GPA at the university
Please stop breaking the site guidelines, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. We've had to ask you this before and you're breaking the rules here pretty frequently. We ban that sort of account.
Having spent a lot of time doing MS admissions at a top-tier CS program, I never really cared that much about specific scores unless they were absolutely terrible. Tests don’t tell you much about an applicant, essays are more helpful to know if somebody can be successful. We did away with tests and I didn’t miss them.
Can't essays be gamed? And if one is better at writing essays, it doesn't necessarily mean he is better at other stuff. MS admissions in particular have people applying from different countries, countries where English is not the primary language.
IMO essay is easier games than the SAT. There is no guarantee on how much essay is actually written by the student compared to SAT, where it actually checks the ID. If anything, if I have the means I would have consultants work with my kid on choosing a topic, then heavily edited for impact while retaining the student’s writing style.
I can see how essays for graduate admissions can be more useful since you have to make a personal statement about your academic/research interests, how the program would help you accomplish your goals, etc. But for undergraduate admissions, the essays are the easiest part of your application to game since they ask about very generic life experiences (e.g. tell us about a hardship you overcame) that are unverifiable.
This is especially true for people with money: either through major editing from professionals ($$$), or just outright paying someone to write them for you ($$$). As someone who went to a rich high school in a large city (as a diversity student), I can tell you the number of students I knew who paid to have their essays written or heavily edited outnumbered those who didn't.
If you read several hundred the professional ones are easy to spot. Sometimes people use the same company to write essay and you’ll find reused materials!
All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is just showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools they should make school funding occur at the state level, rather than whichever random zip code you’re born into.
Seriously, you can’t justify a wealthier neighborhood being entitled to better schools when they’re public institutions receiving state and federal funds. Evening out this funding is the only real step to giving students a more equitable future, but nobody would dare try it and put their own school district’s budget in jeopardy!
They want to fix the problem? Create an executive order requiring that all public schools who receive federal funding must have a percentage of their local funds be distributed at a state level, inversely to the funds generated locally.
As noted in the sibling comment - this has already been implemented in Texas for almost 30 years now. While studying the outcomes and the way it was implemented is an exercise for the reader, it's hardly the silver bullet your comment makes it out to be.
Let's examine the substance of the points the article makes.
> Yet when the money is being transferred to other districts, it becomes a state issue and is therefore a state property tax, which is illegal in Texas.
Ah, geez.
> Furthermore, taking funds from one district to another makes accountability for funding convoluted [...] how will they ever know if their money is being used constructively?
Sure, there's also no way to definitively say that the money is _not_ being used constructively.
> The percentage of Texans graduating was stagnant from 1993 to 2003 - stuck at 77%. If the "Robin Hood" system is supposed to bring up the weaker districts (which tend to be the poorer ones), the statistics show no signs of improvement.
The graduation rate isn't the sole metric that should be considered to make this argument. And even if it is considered, you'd only want to consider the graduate rate change across time in the weaker/poorer districts, not across the whole state.
Is there an article with better criticism? The English Wikipedia entry doesn't really mention any, besides "oh no it's actually a state tax".
> All those taxes aren’t going to poorer districts; the money goes to the state, which also uses it to offset other parts of the budget. “Where did the state spend the ‘savings?’” says a slide from Taxparency Texas. It lists $2.6 billion for cuts in the business franchise tax and $1.2 billion for increasing the homestead exemption.
Agree that both the Wikipedia article I linked and the article you linked are not very good. FWIW, the state property tax illegality issue was somehow addressed shortly after the article you linked was written via some legislation that lowered the minimum obligation to the state and awarded local jurisdictions more leeway to levy their own taxes instead.
Everyone seems to acknowledge that its current implementation is somewhat problematic but there really isn't a clear path forward for resolving the issues with the system that is tenable in the current Texas political and legal climate.
This already exists and it doesn't quite work. School funding and outcomes are less well correlated than you might expect. Some of the worst performing schools and districts are also the best funded. The top causal factor appears to be parental involvement: highly involved parents in even poorly funded schools is better than uninvolved parents in well funded schools.
It exists in many, many states in some form or another: New Jersey (where every dollar collected from the progressive income tax is funneled redistributionarily to municipalities), Connecticut, and Vermont to name a couple.
For one eye-popping counterexample to the notion that redistributionary school funding policies are effective, it might be worth understanding what happened in Newark[0], where 75% of the school is paid for the state already.
It's very common for urban public schools in particular to have the highest or near-highest funding per student in a state and some of the lowest outcomes in terms of standardized testing and other quantifiable measurements.
That makes sense. Ultimately when you have distress at home caused by poverty, violence, neglect, etc. the student will be at a disadvantage no matter how good the school is. Distressed parents will lead to distressed children and then distressed schools which creates a cycle.
This is ultimately a hard problem to solve because so many issues need to be fixed simultaneously. College is way too late to address this.
I was going to say exactly this. I’ll add that free state-sponsored daycare would probably do more for minorities than anything college-related ever could.
Texas actually has a system like this - it's called recapture - or more colloquially, the "Robin Hood law". You can read more here on how it has actually played out in its implementation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_plan
The Wikipedia article makes it sound like it was thrown out. That is very much not the case. It is still in effect today. What happened in 2005 was that local jurisdictions were given more leeway to set their tax rates in lieu of state minimum requirements. Local residents in richer districts got more power to decide whether they should be taxed more to give more funding to their own school. And in reality it works the same after 2005 as before.
The spirit of the law remains in effect today. People like me who currently own a home in the Austin, TX area pay a lot of money via property taxes. School taxes very often make up over half of the property tax burden here, which is already quite high since there is no state income tax and the state has to make money somehow. Almost all of that money is effectively swept up and redistributed to the rest of the state due to the recapture laws.
SFUSD's operating budget (excluding capital expenditure and maybe some other stuff) is $1.1bn. It normally serves 57k students. That's $17k per student per year.
Possibly disagree. The cost of living index in San Francisco is somewhat above 250. Let’s round down to 200, so 2x as expensive as the national average.
That brings $17k down to $8.5k. The average spend per student in K-12 schools nationally is more than $12k.
San Francisco may be significantly underfunded in a nontrivial number of its schools.
There's only a small number of wealthy areas (1% of the population perhaps) that have excess funding. Generally, the funding policies ensure worst schools get more funding. Here's how LA County looks: http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php. -- poor performing LAUSD is easily in the top 10th percentile by funding, strong Arcadia and Pasadena are well below average.
California already has state level funding of schools. Since 2013, the funding formula channels proportionally more money per student to districts with poor students and English learners.
Moreover, some kind of equalization had existed since the 1980s as a consequence of both Prop 13 and Serrano vs. Priest.
> All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is just showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools they should make school funding occur at the state level
Does spending per pupil even correlates with outcomes?
> rather than whichever random zip code you’re born into.
Is it random or the result of the parents hard work?
I think there’s several issues going. The first is a lack of funding in poor schools. Less money, less resources. The second is that just having money doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be managed well by the administration. Maybe that too needs some amount of state oversight.
Lastly, the phrase “parents’ hard work” implies a lot about the core problem here. It’s no secret that wealthy families have a multi-generational advantage on less fortunate ones. Immigrating to this country and working your entire life is hard, and you may still never break out of your socioeconomic class. Perhaps your children may go further, but that’s significantly harder when their education is funded proportionally to your initial circumstances. Success isn’t just hard work, it’s the luck of your innate talents and abilities. It’s also being born at the right time and place to make a better life for your kids.
> The first is a lack of funding in poor schools. Less money, less resources.
Source? We spend more and more on education every year with nothing to show for it[1][2]. Throwing more money at students absolutely does not mean they will be more successful[3]. This is not a problem that can be solved with money.
That wont work. Increasing funding of a school does not improve quality. Allowing families to choose what school they go to, and as a result which school they fund, forces schools to compete on quality or go out of business. The only arguments I have heard against school choice are from teacher's unions that claim that nobody would go to their school if they had a choice. Good! That means you are failing at your job. You should go out of business.
> Allowing families to choose what school they go to,
This is a non-starter for any family that depends on public school buses to transport their kids to school. It might help to some extent in regions if schools are in close proximity but overall it just becomes "School choice for people with parents that can afford it".
Plus I would be surprised if it there's a case the program led to a 'bad' school closing and a 'good' school opening on the same facility/location. What tends to happen (my state has this) is that rich/educated parents do everything they can to get their 3-5 year old into the best school and the poor/uneducated kids are still stuck at the 'bad' school. The 'good' school ends up with a large waitlist which wealthy parents work around by moving close enough (which costs more) such that the good school is the default school for them.
The only equitable method would to make every school use a 100% raffle system but that's not logistically possible.
Schools are not static. Some will fail. New ones will pop up. If there is a group of people in an area that are not served then somebody can create a school to serve them. Make the only government run part of the school system the funding attached to a child.
Do schools compete on quality of education or on self-selecting their students? I suspect it's mostly the latter, given how parents evaluate public schools as well.
You end up failing at your job not by virtue of teaching worse (you might be teaching better), but in not figuring out how to bias your application/admissions process.
While too little funding is an issue, once you hit a baseline the issue is no longer funding.
The rich neighborhoods (and working class neighborhoods that value education) have better schools because their kids are on average better students. They make sure of it and set high expectations.
Nobody believes that you if you just funded Northeastern Illinois State University the same as Northwestern that the student outcomes would be the same. Why do we think the same thing doesn't apply in elementary and high school.
Want to fix the problem? School vouchers at the statewide level.
Some parents move to areas with better schools in order to give their kids an advantage (such as Cupertino or Los Altos school districts if you are in silicon valley). This may seem like a sensible thing to do, but because of the weird admissions process in US colleges, this may actually work against the kid. It may make more sense to move to an area where the kid can stand out, where schools offer fewer AP courses, and where the same accomplishment is considered to be a bigger deal. See link below for details.
UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.
A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
School size is a related factor. For example, Harvard is not going accept 50 applicants from the same school, even if it's a relatively large and exceptionally competitive one like Stuyvesant in NY or Thomas Jefferson in DC. But Harvard will totally accept 8-10 applicants from a small exclusive private or parochial school. The ratio plays in favor of smaller high schools if (say) the population of students going to any one college is capped at 5% for a large school and 10% for a small one.
This bears out in what I've observed (all anecdotes ofc). Many people who go from these sorts of large south bay high schools to top-5 UCs are head and shoulders smarter than the graduates of the small private school => Ivy League pathway, despite the Ivy schools ranking better.
When you see it in action (brilliant kid who went to a large, highly competitive public high school who was rejected from every Ivy, and is way smarter than many students who went to the schools that rejected them), it feels rotten. Happily most of the folks I've met in this category have great careers but their confidence often takes a hit at the age of 17-18.
"People in power today would much rather do something that seems to promote “equity” than make an evidence-based choice that could lead to accusations of racism."
My experience was that the system worked just fine for all kinds of people that got to the point that they wanted to go to a UC.
Among my siblings and our offspring family of 12, we put 6 of family members through the UC system (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD). 3 went through the community college system with no reliance on standardized test scores. 2 took SATs and GPAs. 1 got in this fall on GPA alone.
I think you have it backwards. Standardized testing was a liberal policy to promote egalitarianism and civil rights, and it was historically opposed by conservatives. Liberals persuaded conservatives that standardized testing was a Good Thing, but as with segregation, opposition to mixed-race relationships, and general race essentialism, leftists are copying right-most folks in opposing standardized testing. It's not "liberals appealing to conservatives".
Aligning enrollment with state demographics would require cutting the share of those students by almost two-thirds.
My best friend growing up was Korean. I saw firsthand the amount of effort he put into his studies. Why should we allow any institution to invalidate his work because our culture produces lazier, dumber students? Why should we artificially prop up patterns of thought and behavior that have negative effects on the people subjected to it?
From the article: "People in power today would much rather do something that seems to promote “equity” than make an evidence-based choice that could lead to accusations of racism. This is the kind of infuriating policy decision that looks like it is going to help poor, minority students but will actually harm them."
Removes the motive to excel for all groups of students, why strive when you get accepted by quota instead of test score?
It's how communist countries allocate admissions and jobs, what mattered most was not merit, but collusion to the party. So there was no reason to try to be very good in any field.
I can only wonder if in a few years some company will have an unspoken rule about scoring candidates, thanks to all the affirmative action and "holistic admissions". With these policies, an Asian male has to be extremely talented to land a spot at a good state school/ivy.
I'm an extremely unimpressive Asian male and I got into my state's flagship, which is considered a public ivy according to the 1985 list [0]. If going to a state school is beneath these people (and therefore, even associating with people like me is beneath them) then perhaps I'm perfectly fine with them feeling a tiny bit of discomfort.
We already do those calculations in our heads. We know that many Asians got admitted because they worked very hard, not necessarily because they are very smart or because of good social intelligence. I am sure this affects the way they are perceived in the workforce, the same way people assume things about blacks or women. Usually those assumptions has some basis in reality and as much as you want you can't really control what people think deep down inside, even Stalin couldn't really change it and he used much stricter measurements.
I worked really hard in high school and got basically nothing for it (went to an average college, and now have an average job). My message to your friend would be "tough".
Basic people like you shouldn't be giving messages. You failed so I guess that means you'd prefer if everyone else fails too. I don't know why you're so bitter about your average life because you seem average in general.
Issues with this particular article (addressed by above):
* It's ignoring the racial gap in SAT scores (and other standardized tests) that exists even after controlling for family income. A large part of the political narrative here (including the university backing Prop 16 which would allow it to consider race) is coming from this fact, not just the income gap in itself (Note that I don't think the university ever took the position that the tests were per se discriminatory, which the author claims).
* It's not really defining what "worst" school means; you need to be careful here as you might just be saying the tautological "students at schools with low-performing students on average on low performing". It's making the common claim these schools are underfunded, but on average, lower performing schools are receiving more money. (Example from LA - http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php -- LAUSD, which some of the lowest ranking schools, is well over average funding - areas with top schools - e.g. Arcadia - get the least). Perhaps the author means "underfunded schools relative to what I think they should get", but that's a different statement.
The idea that the SAT is somehow racist is quite laughable. If you controlled for both family income and hours spent per day on academics you'd probably get an equal result. Culture differences mean that Asians are forced by their parents to study longer and harder. As people have pointed out in this thread, parental involvement is the biggest contributing factor to student success, even more than income and school funding. If white/black/whatever parents aren't getting as involved as Asian parents then obviously even if you control for income there will be disproportionate outcomes.
I will ask you this: why do you think black people are overrepresented in the NBA relative to their share of the population? Could it be because black culture highly values sports and black kids tend to spend more time than the average kid playing sports due to parental or cultural influence? That same logic applies to Asians and education.
> Could it be because black culture highly values sports and black kids tend to spend more time than the average kid playing sports due to parental or cultural influence?
Americans love meritocracy and hard work when it comes to sports, and can't stand it when it comes to academics and the resulting income.
For one , you don't need to go straight to college , or attend college at all. Even before I got my BA I was making more than the Ivy League Alum in my family.
That's the first myth.
California has what's probably the best community college system in America. It was very easy for me, as a poor kid to meet ( and at times date) people from all over the world. Maybe you dropped out of high school due to just not liking it. You can still attend a community college, transfer to a UC and have a great career.
I did very poorly in highschool since I was constantly ether getting kicked out or evicted. Still I had morons in my family pressuring me to shrug it off.
If anything I'm angrier now than I was back then
I was exceptionally lucky to be able to find an affordable place to live at 19. My family is pretty horrible, all I really needed was a stable place. But that's impossible now, the same apartment that used to be $600 is now $1,300 or 1400.
For the record I've had several Asian friends who come from similar backgrounds, where there's extreme domestic violence at home and they just need a stable place to live. This is very much not a race issue, it's a 'people who don't have stable households aren't going to be able to get into top schools' issue.
If you want to fix test scores or whatever, you need to look at actually fixing the economic situation many of these kids are in.
Make it possible to afford your own place with a full time minimum wage job. At least then when a kid from a messed up family turns 18 they can move out.
I would encourage any Californian who lives near a CC to consider taking in a younger relative and helping them get established. Even a year lets them find friends/jobs where 2 or 3 of them can get together and find a apt/house if they want or you can't support a 2 or 4 year program.
This is as dumb as when California threw away phonics or when it forced longer-distance busing of white and Asian kids to inner-city schools.
I took the SAT-I (1600) without studying and got a 780 on the math section. How is math racist?
If some schools suck, fix the schools.
If some kids aren't getting enough to eat, feed them.
If some kids aren't in an environment where they have everything they need, put them in quality foster care.
It's not a feel-good, quick fix to lower the bar because it leads to a sense of entitlement, lower confidence, lower competence, and ruins an educational system that the world may decide its not worth sending their students to. If this is normalized, then academia becomes a center of victimhood codependency rather than a center of knowledge, accomplishment, and excellence.
Higher Ed Number cruncher here (who also read the report, which apparently was a big deal to the author since they cited the page count - and many of their arguments hinge on you taking their word for it and not reading at least the exec summary yourself - which is only 8 pages):
So, fun thing about the actual study that the author references... the committee actually __DIDN'T__ tell UC regents to not get rid of the test; they recommended against making it test optional due to variability in assessment requirements between institutions - and the exec summary doesn't include any recommendation for or against fully excising standardized testing from their eval process.
Further, the committee found that while the tests over HSGPA (high test score, low GPA) weighting was used in a subset of cases it was more likely that a student was admitted with just the opposite (low test score, high GPA); and overall it looks like the strongest recommendation was to disincentivize the HSGPA due to it losing almost 25% predictive effectiveness over the tested time period.
This article reads fine until it gets to the last couple of paragraphs, covering "affirmative action" and over-representation of AAPI students; and this is where a glaring issue comes through with their analysis. Like any higher ed institution there is a monetary incentive to get international students; as there isn't usually an out for lower tuition like WUE/WGE (which coincidentally the UC system no longer participates in), interstate compact agreements, and the like for tuition reduction; and the home country in many cases subsidizes the student so the higher ed institution gets full out-of-state tuition rates on a nearly guaranteed basis. So, by using AAPI students as a proxy argument for their weird screed at the end while leaving off factors like what percentage of that UG population is in-state v. out-of-state v. international does a disservice to that over/under-represented claim; while also leaving them off of the earlier analysis pieces moves the slant of the article in a weird way.
For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them; so by not mentioning them until you reach the point you're calling out the discrepancy they end up begging the question around the "model minority" bs; when it really may be explained more concretely through international and out of state student draw.
Ah. So when the article says that by percentage, white students are underrepresented, that’s because the denominator for the student body population includes all students (thus also international and out of state students), rather than just in-state California students?
There is a chance; but more than likely they're quietly mixing what they count in the denominator; especially since with the rest of the URM group and whites it seems they are very careful to call out that its comparisons between the high school pipeline and the in-state collegiate pipeline, but aren't as careful when discussing the AAPI pipeline.
Also, it looks like the study is following federal guidelines (IPEDS/NCES) on student groups; so Asian in this context for international students includes everyone from Korea, China, and Japan, down to the Malaysian Peninsula, through India, all the way west to the Arabian Peninsula (you know, like about 50% of the world population, no biggie there); so there may be some weird mixing of what's included in the denominator for AAPI students.
This is not true, you can see the data[1] yourself for in-state students. It is true that of in-state students at UCs, white students are "underrepresented" compared to their share of the population, but their share of admissions is actually very close to their share of applications so there could be other reasons for this. For example, white students in CA may be:
* more likely to apply to private schools
* more able to afford private schools
* more likely to get accepted to private schools that don't have the same race-blind admissions restrictions that UCs do
> So, by using AAPI students as a proxy argument for their weird screed at the end while leaving off factors like what percentage of that UG population is in-state v. out-of-state v. international does a disservice to that over/under-represented claim; while also leaving them off of the earlier analysis pieces moves the slant of the article in a weird way.
> For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them;
> UC reports international students separately. [sic]
The report cited in the article isn't as clear on their distinction and in some cases the numbers indicate that the comparisons are among feeder, in-state high schools; and others are general enough that the lack of detail is concerning as the study leaves out the total population and only provides percentages.
> Not in higher ed.
While the common/colloquial understanding through recent years shows that Asian students are more represented in higher ed; the general notion of what URM is codified as in higher ed contexts is less known; and wasn't clearly defined in the article. And I initially spoke too broadly, as the PI (pacific islander) portion of AAPI is included in URM, the Asian portion is not; and the PI portion is not mention anywhere in the article; and with AAPI discrimination being in the current cultural Zeitgeist, if that distinction goes unmentioned it's a leading statement.
> The report cited in the article isn't as clear on their distinction and in some cases the numbers indicate that the comparisons are among feeder, in-state high schools; and others are general enough that the lack of detail is concerning as the study leaves out the total population and only provides percentages.
You can look at the data[1] yourself. It's clear that of in-state students enrolling in UCs (not international), Asian Americans make up 36% of enrollees and white Americans make up 20% of enrollees (indeed "underrepresented"). It seems like you are leading on with your comments that it is maybe OK to cut down on Asian representation because most of those students are probably international anyway (which I also don't agree with), but the data clearly shows that such a cut to Asian representation would harm Asian Americans as well.
You're literally __NOT__ citing the study used and provided to the regents and which forms the basis for the article.
Again, as I noted to the GP, the study is not clear in all cases what n they are using when calculating their percentages, and the author of the article takes advantage of that.
Further, you're reading a lot into my comments; I am neither advocating for or against changes to given policy, but that the study leaves inconsistencies that the author readily takes advantage of for their own agenda.
It's possible that dropping standardized tests will have the demographic effects that TFA fears, but it isn't certain. Standardized tests aren't the only reason that Asian-Americans are "over"-represented and other groups are "under"-represented. Another reason is that Asian-Americans are good students. Standardized test scores are not the only indicator of that.
Of course, the people who have decided to drop these tests claim to want some sort of demographic change. As long as California public universities have a limited number of open seats, that will hurt some groups if it helps others. Personally I hope that this doesn't just turn into helping whites at the expense of Asians, but that isn't impossible.
System-wide, any demographic change looks insignificant. No change at Berkeley (which had already increased SES weighing in 2020). UCLA slightly boosted URG, but it looks like some of that might have been application demographic changes (which removing the SAT might have caused to some degree - a small number of students may be discouraged by it)
In most countries students apply to just 1 or 2 colleges. Because college admissions are predictable in other countries. In the US students apply to a dozen or more colleges, and each college requires custom essays. Then these applications go through "holistic reviews". In reality, because of the huge volume of applications, colleges spend 6 to 8 minutes reviewing each application, and the reviewer is often an inexperienced 22-year-old graduate student.
It's literally the same in America. What you're seeing is the "dream hoarder class" lashing out. These are elites that seem to have nothing but contempt for normal folks like me and I'm tired of it.
At my high school most people didn't apply to more than 3 schools (1 or 2 less selective state schools + 1 flagship). I only applied to 4 and only actually had a chance at the two I got into. The undergrad I graduated from didn't require an essay or anything, just SAT scores and GPA. Even my flagship university - a public Ivy - effectively just judges in-state applicants using a GPA/SAT grid system.
I'm not alone in this, my university has about 40,000 students enrolled today.
So your college didn't require an essay. Is that the rule or the exception in the US? Nearly all colleges require essays. Your college may not have used "holistic reviews" but nearly all colleges in the US do.
I don’t know if it’s changed but when I was applying for colleges in 2007 many of them used the same application process called the “common app”. Any university using that meant you only had to fill out information once, including essays, and then you could send out the same application to multiple universities.
At this point I'm really wondering what the ostensible purpose of Universities is, as opposed to their true purpose of wealth signaling.
We live in an age where university level lectures and materials are available for free. Why are we paying a ton of money to obtain a limited slot that allows us to show up at a building for the same lectures and materials?
Is it personal attention? Almost certainly not, but even if it was that can be had on the open market for far less cost.
Access to specialized equipment? Well maybe, but surely there's a more efficient solution there.
Is it certification? Because in my experience, as well as that of many others, the degrees don't say much of anything about competence so what good are they? Besides, it's again a really expensive way to certify people and surely there must be a better method.
One explanation I've heard is insurance - a degree is supposed to prevent someone from making mistakes so egregious that the person ends up in a life of poverty. As you pointed out, degrees are overwhelmingly received by people who already have some family wealth, so it's easy to sell university as the cause of those higher lifetime earnings.
In my opinion there are a few reasons to attend college:
1. You legitimately want to expand human knowledge beyond what exists. This should be the ultimate goal of a PHD. Whether or not this produces important output (in the capitalistic sense, aka is profitable) is secondary to attaining the new knowledge.
2. You want to attain high level knowledge of a subject AND the best way you learn is by having a strict course regiment with a decent teacher-to-student ratio.
3. You just want that check mark on your resume when you try to get a job.
#1 isn't about getting a job. #2 and #3 have some overlap in that the ultimate goal of both tends to be securing a job. The difference between them is how an individual learns material. Some people can read a book, or view youtube lectures, then take some tests and learn sufficiently that way (#3). But some people require #2 style learning.
But let's be honest, the vast majority of people attending college are for #2 or #3. Meaning, it is ultimately about getting a job. So as long as a job in a desired fields requires a degree, people will essentially be required to get them. The trend is recent years seems to be the dramatic split between #2 and #3 style learning.
The SAT is basically institutionalized racism. I think this has been well studied, from its origins until today. If you have the means and money you can get tutored test prep and do significantly better than you would otherwise.
Next on this list will be scholarships and admissions for elite sports. Rowing and gymnastics all favor the wealthy.
It didn't. The author seems to have a gut-felt conviction that there is no bias or damage in standardized testing or its subsequent use for university admissions.
The problem is that every approach to university admissions will be flawed.
Personally I think there should be a lottery system after a certain grade/extracurricular cut-off. The difference at a certain point between students is negligible and a lottery system would help alleviate some bias. Of course there's plenty of things wrong with this approach as well, you're never going to find something that pleases everyone.
I'm not sure of any state universities using a lottery, but some do automatically admit the top N% of students from every high school. For example, U of Texas admits the top top 6% or every high school.
> How do I know all of this? Because unlike the regents, who enthusiastically voted to eliminate the tests for the first time in 2020, I did not ignore the findings of a 225-page report that was prepared for them at the request of the UC’s then-president, Janet Napolitano. This report[1], by the Academic Council’s Standardized Testing Task Force, was based on years of UC admissions data and was the product of a tremendous amount of work by a formidable team of experts in statistics, medicine, law, philosophy, neuroscience, education, anthropology, and admissions.
> The scholars determined that the obvious challenges faced by low-income Black and Latino students were poverty and poor K–12 education. And they found that the UC’s use of standardized tests did not amplify racial disparities. They agreed that the university should continue using test scores in admissions, but recommended that the UC begin developing its own test, which would be designed to meet the needs of both students and the institution.
The issue is not if testing "amplifies" racial disparity.
If it is the link in the chain which makes sure the disparity is carried on, especially to bigger amplifiers like college admission, then the decision to abandon it is clear.
Even if it is also a link in the chain which makes sure the disparity is broken?
You do realize that it is possible for it to be both right?
The question is whether or not it helps more than it hurts and no one seems to care that it helps the students from poorer areas distinguish themselves.
what? did you RTFA? The author gives an argument based on concrete evidence that the SAT helps underrepresented minorities, and states there ALREADY is a pathway (that also lots of underrepresented minorities use) that avoids the SAT, the biggest problem being that statewide guidance counselors are not instructed on the existence of that pathway.
This is a bizarre canard that people keep running with. You can prep for the SAT but it adds 20-30 points at most. So mostly you can't prep for it. You certainly can't buy a high score.
Coaching and tutoring has diminishing returns. Simply having done the practice test before the actual one would both significantly boost the score while reducing the anxiety. The tricks are not hard to learn, and practice tests are cheap to buy (or borrow from library). SAT is (was) probably the cheapest way to boost admission chance for a poor student compared to extracurricular, competitions, volunteering, etc. Those with money always have an advantage, but standardized test like SAT is probably the most egalitarian, as everyone has to take the tests by themselves in a controlled environment.
It helps but you’re not gonna add 1000 points to your score if you didn’t pay attention in high school unless you’re basically attending a high school’s worth of test prep.
Yes yes, have them do it at your lake house during the derby my good sport. You can even take more time if you have your chef prepare you meals so you can study through!
The parent comment is saying that with the SAT removal, the only hard number the admissions officers have left to use is GPA. And GPA is just as gameable, if not even moreso than SAT scores, for kids with wealthy parents.
My response was in the privilege it takes to assume hiring a tutor is trivial / affordable for generic students, not that things can be gamed by wealthy parents.
Replacing the SAT by a "Holistic" process is a convenient way to impose a quota on some groups judged problematic. To directly quote the article:
"There is only one group of students who are “overrepresented,” to use the chilling language of social engineering, at the university: Asian Americans. Twelve percent of K–12 students are Asian or Pacific Islander, compared with 34 percent of UC undergraduates. Aligning enrollment with state demographics would require cutting the share of those students by almost two-thirds. It would mean getting right with contemporary concepts of anti-racism by reviving one of California’s most shameful traditions: clearing Asians out of desirable spaces.
[...]
The UC has an established history in this dirty art. In the 1960s, Asian enrollment at UC Berkeley was strong, and it soared through the ’70s. But in the ’80s, it plummeted mysteriously. Berkeley was investigated by the Department of Education, and in 1989, the chancellor apologized and pledged that this would never happen again."
In fact, the person you responded was asserting that this course of action is meant to deny access to members of certain groups because of their membership in a group, not that they are entitled to access because of their membership in a group.
All the best colleagues I've worked with aced the SAT and/or other standardized tests. I would hate to not be able to refer to them while interviewing job candidates.
Honestly, standardized test scores and some case study type questions would be sufficient to make a decision (along with 1 on 1 convos). I hope a decision like this opens a channel for smart people to get to employment without having to go to school or spend as much time in it.
Edit:
Some people are commenting that relying on scores from years ago can unfairly disadvantage people who have improved since then, and can generally be misleading. I agree with that.
There should be a robust ecosystem of aptitude tests that are generally accepted, are as unbiased (culturally) as possible, and that can be retaken at any time.
I think it's developing, as I've seen some examples of this in the hiring process.
For my first jobs out of college, I listed my SAT scores.
EDIT: Don't understand the downvotes. I went to a top liberal arts college and they told us to, if it was over a certain number. It worked broadly speaking.
Almost no place has this (fairly pointless IMO) policy in place. How predictive is the SAT test I took when I was 16 to my performance on the job a decade later?
> All the best colleagues I've worked with aced the SAT and/or other standardized tests
I did not do well on my SATs (1500/1600) - do you think there's any way to make up for this? Or am I supposed to be as unimpressive as I was at 17 forever?
What world do you living where people share or remember their high school test scores?
I've almost never heard of anyone caring about their SAT scores since freshman/sophomore year of college. The only people who still talk about them are the people who did really well on them complaining that they didn't help get them jobs once they graduated.
You say you don't understand the hate for SAT, but then proceed with an example of how you did better than your ex-gf in college despite doing presumably worse on the SAT then her?
No. He's saying that the GPA in college doesn't matter, because he just asked his teacher to raise his grades, and that worked. Whereas his girlfriend was more intelligent by the SAT, but didn't realize this one simple trick.
My high school GPA was very bad, my SAT was "good enough to get in", and my university GPA was excellent, showing that I was now an adult and taking things seriously.
No SAT, no admission, I think would have been the case for me.
To kinda bounce of your comment and replies, no, I don't think the SAT is racist in any way.
However, I don't think it's a particular useful metric by itself.
I had a near perfect SAT score (sans all this private tutoring people are talking about), but was an absolutely terrible college student. Just wasn't for me, and despite trying twice, I never really got anywhere. I wish I hadn't spent the money. And I hope I didn't prevent someone who was truly more motivated an opportunity in doing so.
I can't point to something better than the SAT, but I can tell you what people don't like about it. SATs correlate with demographics in ways that conflict with the concept that merit is evenly distributed among student demographics.
One approach to prevent people from drawing racist inferences from standardized test scores or other statistics is to adopt the French policy of not collecting or keeping any race statistics. That would allow us to preserve meritocracy without promoting racism or depriving highly qualified applicants of the limited educational opportunities that will help them contribute the most to society.
That sounds good, but having no demographic stats is the opposite of sunlight. I don't believe it makes systemic racism go away, it just sweeps it under the rug.
Racism is a belief though. If we can remove a way that people come to the belief through statistical evidence we can make people believe it less. Keeping statistics can only work to provide evidence for the racists that all races are not of equal ability.
But like, I'm not a good soccer player at all and I don't harbor a belief that I should be placed on a soccer team to the exclusion of others who are much better (as opposed to just marginally better).
The fact is that requiring the SAT leads to worse educational outcomes for Black and Latinx students. You can close your eyes to it all you want and say "but I don't see how that happens, they don't ask you skin color on the test!". That doesn't change the reality on the ground. We need a better system than the SAT as the gatekeeper to higher education. And yes, maybe UC doesn't have the perfect replacement. But at least they're trying.
SAT is a standardized test of academic performance, where in there is an affirmed bias in what criteria you qualify as education worth testing. That bias is substantially amplified by dedicated preparation, which requires assets that are egalitarian.
This means wealthy families are substantially advantaged in SAT test performance. As a measure of preparation more than potential it may well serve as strong indicator future academic participation, but for all the wrong reasons. As such it can be used as a tool for exclusivity as a measure of anything.
To adequately test for performance biases aside divergent tests are better than conforming tests. The difference is the former tests for answer distribution, quantity, and validity where the later asserts correctness by asserting one answer against a single approved answer.
I don’t know why you were immediately downvoted. This is precisely why places are doing the whole holistic thing which isn’t some mysterious quota thing but giving applicants the ability to show off their talents in whatever their strengths are however they manifest. If you’re bad a standardized testing your app won’t immediately hit the trash. But if you are then by all means put your scores on your application.
I will ask uncomfortable questions here. How will this change affect UC’s competitiveness (as measured by alumni quality) against Tshinghua University (China), or IIT (India), or MSU (Russia). Or we don’t care about that any more?
The top students will remain the top students. The Asian kid who would have gone to UC but now goes to Cal Poly will graduate and completely kick the ass of the UC kid who got in through “holistic” means.
Rich, privileged kids who can buy good extra-curricular "experiences" and bribe their way to better grades at private schools will be the big winners here.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] thread> but out here in the crumbling state of California
Yup, no need to read any more.
The downside being lack of good sushi restaurants anywhere near, but ones got to make choices.
In states with functioning real estate markets, a decent house in a decent location costs $700k tops and you don't pay $3-4k/mo in rent for a shitty, tiny apartment next to a homeless encampment. My friend rents a highrise penthouse in Chicago for the same price as a 1930s 3bd apartment in SF.
Is the housing market in the Bay area really uniquely dysfunctional? High property prices are a result of demand outstripping supply. It's what you get for concentrating the entire tech industry in one place. Similar to Manhattan and the financial industry.
In that regard, the real estate market in the Bay area is basically working as intended. Or am I missing something?
They should keep the test, but use a threshold (per major and school) with a lottery for everyone above the threshold. And admit a small number below at random to keep evaluating what the threshold should be.
Not only do lotteries mitigate Goodhart's Law (which rewards 'bad' candidates who appear good, whilst punishing 'good' candidates who don't appear that way); but even a perfect, un-gameable measure can waste resources chasing diminishing returns. Even something as trivial as spelling mistakes can be decisive; and whilst those judging might only care a little about spelling, candidates care a lot about winning, so it's in their interest to obsess over even such minor things.
This imposes a massive opportunity cost, whether it's spending whole childhoods in 'cram schools'; or university salaries going to 'grant proposal writing services' rather than educators and researchers; etc.
Except for the gigantic study commissioned by the UC system the article references?
“ Second, while high-school GPA has been found to be more predictive of success at college than standardized test scores at some schools, the exact opposite turns out to be true for students at UC schools. There, standardized test scores say more about which applicants are likely to earn a degree and to do it in less than eight years; they also correlate strongly with students’ GPA at the university.”
While the article does offer some rebuttal to that claim, I'd like to give a stronger one*: California is 31% white, University of California students are 25% white - they are underrepresented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California#Stude...
*Edit: On second thought, grardb is correct: Comparing with K-12 demographics, as the article does, is better.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...
> But white students are also underrepresented, if only ever so slightly, at the UC: They make up 21 percent of the undergraduate population and 22 percent of K–12 schoolchildren.
If we're talking about college admissions, I think the percentage of white K-12 students is more important than the percentage of white people of any age. Obviously, some people start attending college later in life, but that number isn't high enough to make the demographics of the general population more important than the demographics of K-12 students.
One of these two is a better metric for who will actually pass college courses though.
The only thing that comes to mind is possibly empathy towards the less fortunate, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to result in better life outcomes for a person in our modern society. But let me stress "possibly" because there seems to be plenty of examples of people who dont have any kind of empathy towards others who grew up as poor teenagers.
https://www.hoover.org/research/affirmative-action-around-wo...
https://www.commentary.org/articles/thomas-sowell-2/affirmat...
And of course the Bible on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow...
He’s ignored for the same reason Clarence Thomas is ignored - the juxtaposition between the color of his skin and his words.
Apparently only black voices with the correct political leanings.
Love him or hate him, I highly recommend the documentary. It's very humanizing.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015632217/cornel-west-has-an...
Organizations like the Hoover love to present this as such, but there is a reason why the departments just 100 or so feet away don't interface with them - and it isn't because they are centrists.
Truly a shame...
Not surprisingly, Sowell's article is against affirmative action.
While I was reading it, I was also looking out for anything that might distinguish Sowell as one of "the top 5 intellectuals alive" and saw absolutely nothing. It just seemed like another random article with absolutely nothing special about it.
If there is some evidence that he's so brilliant, it'd be great if someone could point it out.
-- Private schools can curve more leniently so its pay to play
-- Rich schools tend to have more AP/Honor courses which inflate weighted GPAs
I went to one of the best public schools in America and it was not uncommon for someone to take 100% AP/Honors and get a 4.5+ GPA.
You can argue about availability of AP classes / funding / etc, but that doesn't detract from the hard work of the AP students. Plenty of rich white kids take hard AP classes and get D's.
That's how the valedictorian and salutatorian a year or so after me ended up with final grades of something like 103.4 and 103.5.
Getting into an advanced class generally means you already know the material that would be in the normal class (taking trig the year everyone else is taking geometry, for instance). How did you get to where you already knew that material? Well, you were either in the advanced class the year before, or, you already learned the material outside of class. How did you already learn the material outside of class? Better education at home. Which is easy to do with a private tutor or stay at home parent; really hard to do with a single parent, or dual income that don't allow for much in education expenses.
And because you are in an advanced class, you basically get a .5-1.0 bump to your GPA (so people are graduating with a 4.5 GPA at some schools), all because you had the extra early resources; you can't compete with just what the school provides.
You are basically saying if someone is more educated, that they will do better in education.
Yes, that's the point. The more time and effort someone spends in their education, the better they will do in education.
That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves as an indirect proxy for money, rather than a reasonable consideration for class performance, knowledge, aptitude, or any such thing.
If all that's true, then yeah, it's just the kids' choice of how they spend their time and effort, and NOT a proxy for wealth. But I don't think all of that is true.
So if you engage in more and better education, above and beyond the education that one is engaging in school, then that person will be better at education?
Yes, of course.
Just like if someone practices basketball, outside of their school team, and hires a basketball tutor, then they would become better at basketball.
Obviously, if someone spends more of their own time on something, anything, whether it is education, or basketball, or whatever, then they would become better at that thing.
The only question now, is why would that possibly surprise you, that people who go above and beyond whatever everyone else is doing, would become better than everyone else at that thing?
Why would that surprise you?
> That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves as an indirect proxy for money,
So you think poor people just don't work hard enough? Only rich people care about their future and are willing to put in the effort to better themselves?
Sounds like some conservative propaganda to me....
If we're saying that AP tests and classes are too easy, then of course people can have a discussion about increasing difficulty.
Stats from https://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration-Servi...
It comes back to the question of what universities should prioritize. Should they be optimizing for the fairest / most equal student body, or the most gifted / competitive student body?
What you want is the most talented, hardest working, brightest students. That's difficult to discern given the differences in the availability of opportunity. Scaling for availability is hard.
But it is clear that just selecting for the students who succeeded in the best environment will leave you missing out on potential. And worse, that rapidly becomes self-reinforcing, since the next generation of students will be influenced by your choices on this one.
That and babysitting so parents can work without their kids setting the house on fire.
Also, GPA is not a great measure of student quality. IRT [1,2] is better.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1434976 [2] https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...
"Wokeness" and CRT are steps back in logical and rational discussion. Sometimes the truth hurts, and instead of plugging our ears, shouting "LALALALALA", and denigrating the purveyors of said truth, we should accept the truth for what it is and look to the underlying causes.
The modern western allopathic medicine treat-the-symptoms-with-drugs school of thought pervades more than just healthcare.
As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California.
If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT admission policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases) then I would be curious to hear.
California just made it very hard to game.
As the article notes, you absolutely can go to a weaker high school to boost your chance into a UC (parents can also try dropping their income lower to boost their kids as well). Though, neither might not be a good strategy for the long-run anyway.
Also. as someone who grew up in Texas and now lives in California, I can tell you the UT System has more than its fair share of gaming attempts -- as such, you're ineligible for the automatic-in based on rankings if you switch schools in the last 2 years (i.e. you need to get in holistically), and those who attend private high schools also need to get in holistically (because top private schools got caught saying more than 7% of their students were in the top 7% and have non-state-standardized ranking criteria). Granted, being automatically admitted to one of the UT schools via rankings often does _not_ mean admission to UT Austin, but rather a satellite campus.
It's a decently progressive and fair system.
https://news.utexas.edu/2020/06/18/new-ranking-puts-ut-austi...
Native Texan here, not the first time I've heard this strategy.
For in state students, you really can't beat UT's cost to value ratio..people do try hard to get in.
This actually happened when UT started applying the rule. Parents moved their kids to less competitive schools.
This was pre-internet, but people still tracked rankings across the state. One kid would transfer schools to bump their rank two spots. That would cascade to a flurry of transfers. All the top students knew where their GPA would place them in every other high school in the state and everybody was watching for movement. Eventually, they capped the program to be based on your rank midway through senior year to prevent 100s of transfers in the last month of the school year before graduation. Which of course, just moved the activity to the last month in the semester before the last semester before graduation. But then you had to maintain your GPA in the new school for a whole semester, so it involved more risk.
Now that I've told this whole story, let me say that none of it is true. Or, at least, I don't really know how much of it is true. I do know that it was the buzz among students when I was in school. I never entered that world very deeply. I'm pretty sure that it did happen a bit. Probably not as much as it was talked about.
Aren't most schools small enough that this incentivizes sabotaging classmates to boost your relative rank?
It also encourages zero-sum thinking generally.
For example, you may not take an elective (Photography) because getting the top grade in the class would still drop your overall GPA. Despite Spanish being available in middle school, our valedictorian waited until high school because it would count a point higher -- by the time you realize how to play the game, it might be too late.
The other example cited was kids attending a very competitive school up until their senior year and then moving to a less competitive school and graduating a higher rank.
It counted as 2 classes when it came to calculating your GPA...and accordingly was supposed to take up 2 "slots" on your schedule. However it didn't and instead the 2nd slot was always after school, which nobody went to anyways. So it allowed you to fit N+1 AP classes into what would normally be a N class schedule and gave a major advantage when calculating class rank.
As a result you got some very interesting people taking this class who you would never expect, simply to boost their class rank. It saddens me a little now to realize that these kids schedules were planned out from the beginning from fall freshman year to optimize their GPA...but I went to a very competitive school so in retrospect it makes sense.
Bonus, to your point they offered ap options for most arts and electives! You could take AP photography or "honors" art/music which counted as an AP for weighted gpa calculations :P
So students can take a college class, get an A, and receive college credit. Or they can take an AP class, get an A, then take an exam that might determine whether they get college credit. Why take an AP English class when you could just take College Freshman English? Because the AP class will be better for your GPA.
I get to see first hand when advisers are sticking a kid in an AP Government class that is completely pointless instead of the Honors Biology class for GPA reasons. Never mind that the kid wants to be a botonist or marine biologist or anesthesiologist. We don't have room for that. We have to maximize their GPA. Stick them in AP English instead of normal Stats even if they could be in Stats and normal English and are more interested in Stats.
If your kid didn't take the Honors Ag class as a freshman, they're already mathematically eliminated. They will never recover the additional 0.025 point GPA advantage. There are only 64 academic slots available in a four year schedule. There are are 32 highest weighted classes, 16 mid-weights, and 24 low-weights. Only four of those can be taken as a freshman. If you miss just one opportunity, you're out.
So you have a 4.0/4.0 GPA, 4.625/4.75 weighted GPA, and a class ranking of 53.
And hopefully a support group that helped you understand and choose what is most important in life.
I always felt quite vindicated when I got my class rank (8/432) even though I had a "normal" schedule. 0, 3, 6, 7 APs. I even took a free period and only had 6 classes junior year as opposed to the normal 7!
Or the student who was tied for #1 when the school decided they wouldn't accept ties. So they did pole vault scoring and reached back to kindergarten to see who got the first B.
In academics as in sports and all other pursuits, sometimes you just have to be satisfied with excellence regardless of trophies.
A state government might have a very liberal or conservative party in power ... and a given policy might be considered the opposite, but they're not going to revisit it all the time.
The reasons for the policy too might have nothing to do with 'conservative' and 'liberal'.
Personally, I'm not really sure I buy into the idea that any given University has to have a given admissions policy and be 'liberal' or 'conservative'. There's room for a mix of policies across universities IMO / should be a mix.
Fankly I think you could tell most people any random policy is 'conservative' or 'liberal' and they'd just support or oppose it based on that label.
Definitions are all dorked up... and 'conservative' and 'liberal' is too weird and narrow a lens to view everything through.
Just as an example George W. Bush ran a campaign that very vocally opposed "nation building", it was thought to be a very important conservative value. George W. Bush then started the largest / longest nation building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan in decades ...
These terms often don't make any sense when applied.
A regressive system takes away from those that don't have much to give to people that already have a lot.
In this way - a blanket statement of guaranteeing the top x% of students admission into state schools is - I would argue fair and reasonable - but I would also argue is regressive.
This is assuming the top x% of students come from wealthier & more educated families. It's possible this assumption isn't true.
I think progressive policies would be like those that make it easier for certain groups to get admitted (i.e. harder for other groups). This seems unfair, but if you want change, I don't see how you do it fairly.
There may be a few very large issues, but also a gazillion small factors that make up systemic discrimination, both racially and against women. It is impossible for minorities to fight those individually, especially not from a position of weakness. It is more effective to counter at least a small part of the net discriminative effect by relatively simple quotas.
And usually those policies don't make up the balance anyway.
Providing programs to help those in a weaker economic position more directly addresses the need, results in programs that everyone can feel that maybe they or their family might benefit from, and avoids perpetuating raced based discrimination and the resulting resentment.
If when economic equality isn't the inequality you're attempting to correct it's so highly correlated that it should be sufficient-- after all, a big part about why we care about the lasting effects of historic racism is that it has produced a lasting weakened economic standing.
They'll often go straight for petroleum engineering if their career path is as calculated during college as it was in high school, and end up with a six figure salaxy at age 22 (not sure this still works as of 2020 given the problems with Houston's gas sector).
For some parents, making sure their child has a sure fire path to the middle class is what they consider their main responsibility, and will do things as crazy as move to a worse school district just to get them on the above track.
If you're as cynical about the value of education (to provide a "job") as the people described, you'll absolutely sacrifice the quality of your kids education (moving to a school with ostensibly less talented or credentialed teachers and possibly less academically gifted peers to learn from and larger class sizes) in order to game the system.
Nobody with money goes out of their way to send their children to a school in a 'common' part of town, because they don't want their children to mix up with 'the wrong kind' of people.
This understandably made people unhappy at the host school - ~7% of the class is academic high achievers from out of the school zone who take most of the admission spots reserved for the top N%.
I don't know of any cases of parents moving to avoid the extra competition, but I probably wouldn't have heard of that if it happened. I do know of some people set on going to UT who did not apply to the magnet program so they could have less competition.
The point here is you don't need to move to a rural area to decrease school competition. There are plenty of cases where you can move a mile to get into the zone of a less competitive school.
Why should my chance of getting into college be hampered by where my parents live or what color skin they gave me??
Aiding one person is inherently discriminating against another.
Why should theirs be hampered by the same?
The reason this exists is that it's effectively an affirmative action program for both urban segregated schools and rural schools, which combined have enough political power to pull this off. I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this to be constructed - note that suburbs in general fight against such policies.
UT itself generally doesn't like the state mandated policy because it results in a less academically strong cohort than other flagship universities, reducing its rank.
Whether one school's admission program is "better" or not depends on what you view as the purpose of universities (something often lost in these conversations). Are you weighing more academically similar cohort (in which case purely predictive measures of performance are most appropriate) or some sort of equity metric where putting students from less socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds with stronger ones can result in higher upward mobility? One can certainly make the case that the Texan system could be failing on both accounts compared to say UCs, but you'd need to try to build a causal model to understand which school is producing better results for students that arrive.
Do universities exist for students? Or do students exist for universities?
I'm sure university administration believe the latter, but given that they're supported by the state (in UT's case, ~25% of their budget?) there's a pretty strong argument that they owe the people of the state education.
The metric that can be measured is not the eternal metric. The result that can be result-driven is not the eternal result.
Rankings are an easy "objective" measurement administrators can take to financial supporters (either government or private) and say "Here's what we're spending your dollars on." Consequently, rankings become very important to administrators.
The administration will all profess a desire not to be so beholden but it’s part of the game so to speak, you have to play.
Source: current board member of a public university college
I hadn't considered that. Good insight.
Regardless, the argument here is simply which people they select. Assuming they hold 90% of spots for Texans (required by law), it's just a question of how they select people. The university wants to select the strongest students holistically (which some additional diversification criteria) - the state wants it to select the top 7% of students from every high school. Even if you argue the people are owed a state education, either criterion is a valid way to select the students that attend.
Unfortunately, what I suspect is going on with all this high minded "get rid of the SATs" is really going to at least help the universities combat what was an increasing pressure to do pre and post testing to validate or establish the value of a university's program. You cannot as easily gain useful information if you have no pre-test.
The very irony of this is of course that it is a kind of deliberate and manipulative breaking of the scientific process by universities who will simply claim even more profusely that their graduates improve over 4 years of study, without any control of variables.
The only possibility I see to circumvent what may be a devious scheme is for citizens to press state Legislatures to require a pre-test on entry and a post-test on graduation. Expect extreme pushback though because the data that is available strongly indicates that universities are largely not actually conferring the value one may expect. In other words, the quality of the students on entry is the primary determination of the quality of the student on graduation, which seems to hold across the board.
The best students were called 4clickers. They sat in the front row, with four color pens in hand. They never helped, and one on occasion turned her in for cheating. She used to talk about how competitive thstudrnts were. They all wanted a spot in a graduate program. It was the most depressing school I ever visited. Couldn't wait to leave on Sunday. (I was suprised she cheated, but it taught me something about "the high caliber" student.)
But if you're in one of those programs where the Undergrad is fairly worthless by itself and are competing for a limited number of slots at a prestigious grad program, that's when then cutthroats start to emerge.
I believe california has a similar program (or did at some time since Bakke), specifically for UC (the "higher tier" university system, versus cal state system)
It doesn't get you into the top UC though (which Texas' program does), just any. There is wide variance in UC schools.
And what is the "top" UC anyways. This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I personally think more favorably of UCSD over cal, and, for some disciplines Davis or SC over cal. UCLA is highly regarded across the board and probably exceeds cal, for, say pre-nursing program.
The primary flip side to the top 10% law is that urban centers have much higher levels of competition than rural ones. If you happen to go to high school in Nowhere, Texas, it's quite easy to go to UT since achieving that top 6% is a somewhat trivial endeavor. Whereas if you go to an urban high school in a population center such as Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, you have to really apply yourself.
I think making the system more equitable by supporting kids from all backgrounds is socially beneficial, even if it sometimes makes suburbanites complain.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/sat-scores-...
In an urban area, residential areas are typically segregated by wealth, and wealthier parents want their kids to go to good schools. Further, they are capable of moving within the area so that their children go to good schools. As a result, the competition among students for the top N% more fierce due to the pre-selection of students.
I think you mean if you go to a good school you need to apply yourself. If you live in a rough neighborhood and go to a bad school, it's not really all that difficult. Of course, you have to get through high school, which is not so easy in the rough neighborhoods. But you get the idea.
* Consider a family where the highschool student has to work to help out with rent and food bills, so they miss school or don't have time to work on assignments. Compare this to a wealthier family where the student has all the free time in the world.
* Or consider a district that skews wealthier and tutors push the haves up into the 10%, and push the have nots below. Plenty of the have nots would have hit the 10% threshold if only they had money.
* Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities.
These are just a few I've read about off the top of my head. The idea of standardized testing is fair, but only if it is aware of inequities in the system. This has been a debate since the 70's. In fact, the popular TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" did an episode about systemic racism in standardized testing the early 1980's.
I'm not arguing if Cali has it right or wrong, but there are problems with using just testing.
Second, you are not offering an alternative solution that would be preferable.
Also, you are not recognizing that fixing in the top 6% is not a requirement for admission so it is possible for the situations you list to be addressed.
Finally you end with an argument against standardized testing which has nothing to do with the comment you are replying to. In fact the 6% policy allows a student to get into the university without ever taking a standardized test.
> Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities
For example these people by your own definition will be rare. They might also be disadvantaged in other ways should they live elsewhere, which means that that the same person in two different places would simply face a different set of disadvantages which might even themselves out. Likewise "a district that skews wealthier" should naturally have fewer "have-nots" than other districts so "have-nots" themselves would not be disadvantaged on average.
You cannot resolve prior inequities by forcing students into college- they drop out at higher rates, with higher (unforgivable!) debts, and word of mouth of their experiences will continue to deter others from trying.
I personally witnessed this happen to friends I had made my freshman year at school.
The ACT in particular has a really low bar for anyone who does reasonably well in school- most state schools around here had a minimum score that certainly required no preparation to achieve.
Alas, my alma mater did not, and it was pretty obvious to everyone that they were athletes first, and kept up appearances about schooling. I am reasonably confident that several degree programs that the school offered would not have existed if the football and basketball programs didn't exist.
Would they have been able to let in more students who would have bean more focused on schooling? Honestly, I don't know, but I strongly suspect there are lower hanging fruit to pick first.
Picking easy majors like communications, marketing, or business.
Buying homework.
Proctorless tests.
A law was passed in 2009 for the University of Texas specifically, that stated "the university must automatically admit enough students to fill 75 percent of available Texas resident spaces" [1]. That 10% number has dwindled down to the top 6%.
As a past automatic admission, I'm horrified hearing stories from coworkers. The process was never stressful for me -- I sent in one application, heard back before the holidays and was done.
[1] https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions#fndtn-freshman...
The University had 50,000 students at that time. During my time there, they were constantly trying to find a way to reduce that number and succeeded at some point, so the 2009 law may have been a result.
There isn't much that is progressive about property taxes. They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates).
Texas specifically has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, and that's in part because we have no income tax. Income taxes, though, are actually progressive.
Note that Texas's high property tax rates is one of the significant contributors to gentrification.
For some states it is a flat rate, I know of one.
But to me is the largest issue is funding for public schools and quality. At one time you would leave high-school with an education that was similar to what you get now in a 4 year college.
These days all we are doing is running a kind-of day care until the public school student leaves to work at McDonalds in the afternoon once the School Day ends.
I also remember some Profs saying in many cases, the first year of collage is a re-education of what the student should already know.
Absolutely not. The burden of property taxes falls largely on the capitalized asset-value of real estate, so a typical middle-class household can offset much of that burden by paying for a smaller mortgage in the first place. And poor renters largely benefit by not having to pay local income or sales taxes, since the burden of the tax will fall on their landlords. Property taxes are in fact quite progressive.
In addition, it's erroneous to think that property taxes are shouldered by landlords. They are, in fact, passed on to renters.
This is not how the rental business works. Property tax is simply a cost passed on to the renter.
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
The high school I went to was public but it had 15 perfect SAT scores in my grade, numerous full rides to Harvard, and such. Good luck with getting into the top 10% of that.
A fairer way would be to rank the top 10% of students statewide by SAT/ACT and GPA.
UC is the more elite of two separate state funded university systems in CA, but it has a similar guarantee (but not campus-of-choice), that evaluates earlier (counts only 10th and 11th grade) and has a 9% cutoff for the “in your class” guarantee, which is called “Eligibility in Local Context”.
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
They also guarantee admission to the top 9% statewide, even if they aren't top 9% of class.
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
California State University, the larger state-funded system, has a process called “redirection” which functions as a kind of admission guarantee for qualified California residents who are applying as first-time freshman or certain transfer statuses, but I can’t easily find clear documentation of the cutoff (which may just be the minimum CSU eligibility cutoffs), but in any case is broader than UCs.
I'm not convinced that Texas is more progressive here. (Even before considering the sibling comments that indicate that the actual current guarantee is less than the top 10%.)
The UC system includes schools like UC Merced which just aren't that competitive or prestigious to begin with, just as the UT system includes schools that are much less competitive/prestigious than UT Austin.
In California the worthies are untitled hereditary aristocrats who secure political power by accumulating and supporting vast client populations. These clients vote for the aristocratic party and provide it with a patina of moral justification. It is an intensely traditional political form that can be found in other societies going back thousands of years. These aristocrats in turn ensure that big corporate interests get favored tax treatment (often effectively zero tax) while preventing small business competition through hyper regulation. BigCo gets subsidized and pays zero tax, LilCo gets hit with endless demands for paperwork and fines. You can find similar social forms in many societies throughout history: it's not special or unique.
Just want to point out that the policy you're referring to was put in place while Democrats ran Texas. Historically Texas was a Democratic state, with only eight years of Republican governors from 1874-1995.
> more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California
And also that California was historically a Republican state. For most of the years from 1943-1999, they had a Republican governor.
Unless we involve football, for example. Sports break the model.
While I (as a graduate of UT Austin) agree with most of your comment, I would like to know why you believe Texas' tax policies are progressive?
(Texas does not have an income tax, but does have (very high) property taxes. A resident of Texas with a large income but a small real-estate footprint pays relatively few taxes (which is why many wealthy individuals choose Texas as their state of residence) while an average homeowner, whose house is the largest asset, pays a greater relative tax rate.)
Texan here. I'll share my story, at risk of coming across as big headed: I feel the 7% percent policy unfairly shut me out of a "better" school. I can't tell if it negatively or positively impacted my career. It either allowed me to focus more on becoming a better programmer (going to an easier school); or it made me lag in my career 1-2 years (not being able to go from a top school directly into FAANG/a SV startup).
For my first 1-2 years of HS, I had a somewhat challenging personal life and didn't take any advanced courses. It wasn't until the 3rd year I stepped up in every way possible, taking all AP courses, and getting 4-5s in 8 AP tests by graduation. I don't recall what my GPA was, but thanks to my false start it didn't meet the threshold, and I attribute being not accepted to UT to the fewer spots available due to the 7% rule.
( an aside, I'm still baffled at how this happened. By all accounts I was overqualified: won a regional UIL CS championship, had multiple gaming projects, knew multiple programming languages. There's a larger critique here about how the hell colleges determine admissions. I assume the quantitative, filterable metrics like GPA precluded anyone of importance from reading any of my qualitative attributes )
GPA is something you can game, and people in my school did. For example, the two highest level math courses you can take in HS is Calculus AB and Calculus BC–the former covers half a year of college-level math, and the latter covers a full year, both over the course of senior year. I chose BC due to an interest in math. Many others chose AB simply because they would both be weighted the same in GPA calculations, and clearly AB would be easier. The result is that the BC class had a dozen students and AB had 30. By informal surveying, the highest ranking students in the graduating class took AB, not BC. This is just one example: there are other ways a students can reduce how much they learn in favor of a higher GPA. I absolutely do not regret taking BC, it was the best part of my HS education. It's a shame it possibly harmed my college admissions.
In the end, I was rejected from my first choice (UT Austin), was accepted to University of Houston on a half-free ride, but was very disillusioned with the quality of their CS program during my entire tenure. I landed in a subpar job right out of college, and after a year at a software consulting firm for the oil industry I managed to get myself to Silicon Valley (after throwing a hail mary and moving to Seattle without a job–and then using a connection to a friend I met in Calculus BC to get a referral at a startup), where my career really started. In hindsight it was just a year or two, and perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but I think the admissions process at UT really failed to identify me as a worthy entrant, and I think the 7% rule exacerbated this. I used to be salty about this (in college / in my subpar job), but now I don't give it any thought.
I count myself lucky because, like many in this field, I was motivated to develop my programming skills outside school. Perhaps going to a weaker CS college allowed me to focus more on skills more relevant to software engineering (I even had time to consult in college).
________
btw, UT Austin has a unique provision in the Texas law that reduces the 10% requirement to slightly less, hence my usage of 7%. See https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/
Now imagine the situation for a student with a poor family who finds themselves in a school mostly with students from wealthy families? The "top-%" metric would doubly harm them.
On the plus side, at least the top-% metric provides an incentive for students to attend 'worse' schools, which to the extent that students are benefited by mixing with more capable students, could help everyone.
> standardized test scores say more about which applicants are likely to earn a degree and to do it in less than eight years; they also correlate strongly with students’ GPA at the university
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If a college thinks an SAT is not a good way to judge candidates, maybe tests in general aren't a good way to evaluate their own students.
This is especially true for people with money: either through major editing from professionals ($$$), or just outright paying someone to write them for you ($$$). As someone who went to a rich high school in a large city (as a diversity student), I can tell you the number of students I knew who paid to have their essays written or heavily edited outnumbered those who didn't.
Seriously, you can’t justify a wealthier neighborhood being entitled to better schools when they’re public institutions receiving state and federal funds. Evening out this funding is the only real step to giving students a more equitable future, but nobody would dare try it and put their own school district’s budget in jeopardy!
They want to fix the problem? Create an executive order requiring that all public schools who receive federal funding must have a percentage of their local funds be distributed at a state level, inversely to the funds generated locally.
Its so obvious and it’s never on the table, which tells me everything I need to know about “reformers”.
Until this is done, most everything else it shuffling deck chairs.
Let's examine the substance of the points the article makes.
> Yet when the money is being transferred to other districts, it becomes a state issue and is therefore a state property tax, which is illegal in Texas.
Ah, geez.
> Furthermore, taking funds from one district to another makes accountability for funding convoluted [...] how will they ever know if their money is being used constructively?
Sure, there's also no way to definitively say that the money is _not_ being used constructively.
> The percentage of Texans graduating was stagnant from 1993 to 2003 - stuck at 77%. If the "Robin Hood" system is supposed to bring up the weaker districts (which tend to be the poorer ones), the statistics show no signs of improvement.
The graduation rate isn't the sole metric that should be considered to make this argument. And even if it is considered, you'd only want to consider the graduate rate change across time in the weaker/poorer districts, not across the whole state.
Is there an article with better criticism? The English Wikipedia entry doesn't really mention any, besides "oh no it's actually a state tax".
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/04/06/wil...
> All those taxes aren’t going to poorer districts; the money goes to the state, which also uses it to offset other parts of the budget. “Where did the state spend the ‘savings?’” says a slide from Taxparency Texas. It lists $2.6 billion for cuts in the business franchise tax and $1.2 billion for increasing the homestead exemption.
Here is a more recent article with some numbers that I linked in a sibling comment that details how Texas has essentially painted itself into a corner with Robin Hood funding: https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-rec...
Everyone seems to acknowledge that its current implementation is somewhat problematic but there really isn't a clear path forward for resolving the issues with the system that is tenable in the current Texas political and legal climate.
For one eye-popping counterexample to the notion that redistributionary school funding policies are effective, it might be worth understanding what happened in Newark[0], where 75% of the school is paid for the state already.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district
It’s a shame that the law only applied in full effect for 10 years. That’s barely enough time to fix a generation of students.
The spirit of the law remains in effect today. People like me who currently own a home in the Austin, TX area pay a lot of money via property taxes. School taxes very often make up over half of the property tax burden here, which is already quite high since there is no state income tax and the state has to make money somehow. Almost all of that money is effectively swept up and redistributed to the rest of the state due to the recapture laws.
Here's an article that discusses its current impacts in more detail: https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-rec...
I don't doubt that funding is part of it, but there's definitely some more nuance to it.
Funding is not the problem.
That brings $17k down to $8.5k. The average spend per student in K-12 schools nationally is more than $12k.
San Francisco may be significantly underfunded in a nontrivial number of its schools.
But, putting that aside, isn't ~$2k per class per day enough, even in San Francisco? If we were to increase funding for SFUSD, would outcomes improve?
- [20 students/class] * [$17k/year/student] / [180 days/year]
There's only a small number of wealthy areas (1% of the population perhaps) that have excess funding. Generally, the funding policies ensure worst schools get more funding. Here's how LA County looks: http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php. -- poor performing LAUSD is easily in the top 10th percentile by funding, strong Arcadia and Pasadena are well below average.
Moreover, some kind of equalization had existed since the 1980s as a consequence of both Prop 13 and Serrano vs. Priest.
It hasn’t fixed the problem.
Does spending per pupil even correlates with outcomes?
> rather than whichever random zip code you’re born into.
Is it random or the result of the parents hard work?
Lastly, the phrase “parents’ hard work” implies a lot about the core problem here. It’s no secret that wealthy families have a multi-generational advantage on less fortunate ones. Immigrating to this country and working your entire life is hard, and you may still never break out of your socioeconomic class. Perhaps your children may go further, but that’s significantly harder when their education is funded proportionally to your initial circumstances. Success isn’t just hard work, it’s the luck of your innate talents and abilities. It’s also being born at the right time and place to make a better life for your kids.
Are they really less funded? Interestingly, poorer schools are often eligible for state and federal grants.
> The second is that just having money doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be managed well by the administration.
That's interesting.
Source? We spend more and more on education every year with nothing to show for it[1][2]. Throwing more money at students absolutely does not mean they will be more successful[3]. This is not a problem that can be solved with money.
[1] https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart....
[2] https://reason.org/commentary/inflation-adjusted-k-12-educat...
[3] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
This is a non-starter for any family that depends on public school buses to transport their kids to school. It might help to some extent in regions if schools are in close proximity but overall it just becomes "School choice for people with parents that can afford it".
Plus I would be surprised if it there's a case the program led to a 'bad' school closing and a 'good' school opening on the same facility/location. What tends to happen (my state has this) is that rich/educated parents do everything they can to get their 3-5 year old into the best school and the poor/uneducated kids are still stuck at the 'bad' school. The 'good' school ends up with a large waitlist which wealthy parents work around by moving close enough (which costs more) such that the good school is the default school for them.
The only equitable method would to make every school use a 100% raffle system but that's not logistically possible.
You end up failing at your job not by virtue of teaching worse (you might be teaching better), but in not figuring out how to bias your application/admissions process.
The rich neighborhoods (and working class neighborhoods that value education) have better schools because their kids are on average better students. They make sure of it and set high expectations.
Nobody believes that you if you just funded Northeastern Illinois State University the same as Northwestern that the student outcomes would be the same. Why do we think the same thing doesn't apply in elementary and high school.
Want to fix the problem? School vouchers at the statewide level.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co...
Excerpts:
UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.
A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
This bears out in what I've observed (all anecdotes ofc). Many people who go from these sorts of large south bay high schools to top-5 UCs are head and shoulders smarter than the graduates of the small private school => Ivy League pathway, despite the Ivy schools ranking better.
When you see it in action (brilliant kid who went to a large, highly competitive public high school who was rejected from every Ivy, and is way smarter than many students who went to the schools that rejected them), it feels rotten. Happily most of the folks I've met in this category have great careers but their confidence often takes a hit at the age of 17-18.
My experience was that the system worked just fine for all kinds of people that got to the point that they wanted to go to a UC.
Among my siblings and our offspring family of 12, we put 6 of family members through the UC system (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD). 3 went through the community college system with no reliance on standardized test scores. 2 took SATs and GPAs. 1 got in this fall on GPA alone.
My best friend growing up was Korean. I saw firsthand the amount of effort he put into his studies. Why should we allow any institution to invalidate his work because our culture produces lazier, dumber students? Why should we artificially prop up patterns of thought and behavior that have negative effects on the people subjected to it?
It's how communist countries allocate admissions and jobs, what mattered most was not merit, but collusion to the party. So there was no reason to try to be very good in any field.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Ivy#Original_list_publi...
Issues with this particular article (addressed by above):
* It's ignoring the racial gap in SAT scores (and other standardized tests) that exists even after controlling for family income. A large part of the political narrative here (including the university backing Prop 16 which would allow it to consider race) is coming from this fact, not just the income gap in itself (Note that I don't think the university ever took the position that the tests were per se discriminatory, which the author claims).
* It's not really defining what "worst" school means; you need to be careful here as you might just be saying the tautological "students at schools with low-performing students on average on low performing". It's making the common claim these schools are underfunded, but on average, lower performing schools are receiving more money. (Example from LA - http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php -- LAUSD, which some of the lowest ranking schools, is well over average funding - areas with top schools - e.g. Arcadia - get the least). Perhaps the author means "underfunded schools relative to what I think they should get", but that's a different statement.
* UC admission data for 2021 is out (https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/co...), so it's possible to start objectively assessing the impact of the policy.
I will ask you this: why do you think black people are overrepresented in the NBA relative to their share of the population? Could it be because black culture highly values sports and black kids tend to spend more time than the average kid playing sports due to parental or cultural influence? That same logic applies to Asians and education.
Americans love meritocracy and hard work when it comes to sports, and can't stand it when it comes to academics and the resulting income.
That's the first myth.
California has what's probably the best community college system in America. It was very easy for me, as a poor kid to meet ( and at times date) people from all over the world. Maybe you dropped out of high school due to just not liking it. You can still attend a community college, transfer to a UC and have a great career.
I did very poorly in highschool since I was constantly ether getting kicked out or evicted. Still I had morons in my family pressuring me to shrug it off.
If anything I'm angrier now than I was back then
I was exceptionally lucky to be able to find an affordable place to live at 19. My family is pretty horrible, all I really needed was a stable place. But that's impossible now, the same apartment that used to be $600 is now $1,300 or 1400.
For the record I've had several Asian friends who come from similar backgrounds, where there's extreme domestic violence at home and they just need a stable place to live. This is very much not a race issue, it's a 'people who don't have stable households aren't going to be able to get into top schools' issue.
If you want to fix test scores or whatever, you need to look at actually fixing the economic situation many of these kids are in.
Make it possible to afford your own place with a full time minimum wage job. At least then when a kid from a messed up family turns 18 they can move out.
This is as dumb as when California threw away phonics or when it forced longer-distance busing of white and Asian kids to inner-city schools.
I took the SAT-I (1600) without studying and got a 780 on the math section. How is math racist?
If some schools suck, fix the schools.
If some kids aren't getting enough to eat, feed them.
If some kids aren't in an environment where they have everything they need, put them in quality foster care.
It's not a feel-good, quick fix to lower the bar because it leads to a sense of entitlement, lower confidence, lower competence, and ruins an educational system that the world may decide its not worth sending their students to. If this is normalized, then academia becomes a center of victimhood codependency rather than a center of knowledge, accomplishment, and excellence.
So, fun thing about the actual study that the author references... the committee actually __DIDN'T__ tell UC regents to not get rid of the test; they recommended against making it test optional due to variability in assessment requirements between institutions - and the exec summary doesn't include any recommendation for or against fully excising standardized testing from their eval process.
Further, the committee found that while the tests over HSGPA (high test score, low GPA) weighting was used in a subset of cases it was more likely that a student was admitted with just the opposite (low test score, high GPA); and overall it looks like the strongest recommendation was to disincentivize the HSGPA due to it losing almost 25% predictive effectiveness over the tested time period.
This article reads fine until it gets to the last couple of paragraphs, covering "affirmative action" and over-representation of AAPI students; and this is where a glaring issue comes through with their analysis. Like any higher ed institution there is a monetary incentive to get international students; as there isn't usually an out for lower tuition like WUE/WGE (which coincidentally the UC system no longer participates in), interstate compact agreements, and the like for tuition reduction; and the home country in many cases subsidizes the student so the higher ed institution gets full out-of-state tuition rates on a nearly guaranteed basis. So, by using AAPI students as a proxy argument for their weird screed at the end while leaving off factors like what percentage of that UG population is in-state v. out-of-state v. international does a disservice to that over/under-represented claim; while also leaving them off of the earlier analysis pieces moves the slant of the article in a weird way.
For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them; so by not mentioning them until you reach the point you're calling out the discrepancy they end up begging the question around the "model minority" bs; when it really may be explained more concretely through international and out of state student draw.
Tricky article!
Also, it looks like the study is following federal guidelines (IPEDS/NCES) on student groups; so Asian in this context for international students includes everyone from Korea, China, and Japan, down to the Malaysian Peninsula, through India, all the way west to the Arabian Peninsula (you know, like about 50% of the world population, no biggie there); so there may be some weird mixing of what's included in the denominator for AAPI students.
* more likely to apply to private schools
* more able to afford private schools
* more likely to get accepted to private schools that don't have the same race-blind admissions restrictions that UCs do
* more likely to go out-of-state for college
[1] https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/chapt...
UC reports international students separately. They also have dedicated reports for CA. Here's the CA admissions data: https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/_f...
> For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them;
Not in higher ed.
The report cited in the article isn't as clear on their distinction and in some cases the numbers indicate that the comparisons are among feeder, in-state high schools; and others are general enough that the lack of detail is concerning as the study leaves out the total population and only provides percentages.
> Not in higher ed.
While the common/colloquial understanding through recent years shows that Asian students are more represented in higher ed; the general notion of what URM is codified as in higher ed contexts is less known; and wasn't clearly defined in the article. And I initially spoke too broadly, as the PI (pacific islander) portion of AAPI is included in URM, the Asian portion is not; and the PI portion is not mention anywhere in the article; and with AAPI discrimination being in the current cultural Zeitgeist, if that distinction goes unmentioned it's a leading statement.
You can look at the data[1] yourself. It's clear that of in-state students enrolling in UCs (not international), Asian Americans make up 36% of enrollees and white Americans make up 20% of enrollees (indeed "underrepresented"). It seems like you are leading on with your comments that it is maybe OK to cut down on Asian representation because most of those students are probably international anyway (which I also don't agree with), but the data clearly shows that such a cut to Asian representation would harm Asian Americans as well.
[1] https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/chapt...
Again, as I noted to the GP, the study is not clear in all cases what n they are using when calculating their percentages, and the author of the article takes advantage of that.
Further, you're reading a lot into my comments; I am neither advocating for or against changes to given policy, but that the study leaves inconsistencies that the author readily takes advantage of for their own agenda.
Of course, the people who have decided to drop these tests claim to want some sort of demographic change. As long as California public universities have a limited number of open seats, that will hurt some groups if it helps others. Personally I hope that this doesn't just turn into helping whites at the expense of Asians, but that isn't impossible.
Applications: https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/co...
Admissions: https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/co...
System-wide, any demographic change looks insignificant. No change at Berkeley (which had already increased SES weighing in 2020). UCLA slightly boosted URG, but it looks like some of that might have been application demographic changes (which removing the SAT might have caused to some degree - a small number of students may be discouraged by it)
The system of "holistic reviews" and unpredictability was introduced to control the number of Jewish people being admitted to top universities. More here: https://circles.page/5680a56b5c28af0998656e09/College-Admiss...
At my high school most people didn't apply to more than 3 schools (1 or 2 less selective state schools + 1 flagship). I only applied to 4 and only actually had a chance at the two I got into. The undergrad I graduated from didn't require an essay or anything, just SAT scores and GPA. Even my flagship university - a public Ivy - effectively just judges in-state applicants using a GPA/SAT grid system.
I'm not alone in this, my university has about 40,000 students enrolled today.
We live in an age where university level lectures and materials are available for free. Why are we paying a ton of money to obtain a limited slot that allows us to show up at a building for the same lectures and materials?
Is it personal attention? Almost certainly not, but even if it was that can be had on the open market for far less cost.
Access to specialized equipment? Well maybe, but surely there's a more efficient solution there.
Is it certification? Because in my experience, as well as that of many others, the degrees don't say much of anything about competence so what good are they? Besides, it's again a really expensive way to certify people and surely there must be a better method.
1. You legitimately want to expand human knowledge beyond what exists. This should be the ultimate goal of a PHD. Whether or not this produces important output (in the capitalistic sense, aka is profitable) is secondary to attaining the new knowledge.
2. You want to attain high level knowledge of a subject AND the best way you learn is by having a strict course regiment with a decent teacher-to-student ratio.
3. You just want that check mark on your resume when you try to get a job.
#1 isn't about getting a job. #2 and #3 have some overlap in that the ultimate goal of both tends to be securing a job. The difference between them is how an individual learns material. Some people can read a book, or view youtube lectures, then take some tests and learn sufficiently that way (#3). But some people require #2 style learning.
But let's be honest, the vast majority of people attending college are for #2 or #3. Meaning, it is ultimately about getting a job. So as long as a job in a desired fields requires a degree, people will essentially be required to get them. The trend is recent years seems to be the dramatic split between #2 and #3 style learning.
I did average on my SAT compared to my ex-gf in college (top 30 US school) but I ran a 3.8 in college compared to her being a C student.
Doesn't matter anyway because none of the stuff I learned in college is used in my daily job as a java developer.
Next on this list will be scholarships and admissions for elite sports. Rowing and gymnastics all favor the wealthy.
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/views/2020/08/17/h...
Maybe we need randomized admissions when kids qualify above a threshold...
Personally I think there should be a lottery system after a certain grade/extracurricular cut-off. The difference at a certain point between students is negligible and a lottery system would help alleviate some bias. Of course there's plenty of things wrong with this approach as well, you're never going to find something that pleases everyone.
> How do I know all of this? Because unlike the regents, who enthusiastically voted to eliminate the tests for the first time in 2020, I did not ignore the findings of a 225-page report that was prepared for them at the request of the UC’s then-president, Janet Napolitano. This report[1], by the Academic Council’s Standardized Testing Task Force, was based on years of UC admissions data and was the product of a tremendous amount of work by a formidable team of experts in statistics, medicine, law, philosophy, neuroscience, education, anthropology, and admissions.
> The scholars determined that the obvious challenges faced by low-income Black and Latino students were poverty and poor K–12 education. And they found that the UC’s use of standardized tests did not amplify racial disparities. They agreed that the university should continue using test scores in admissions, but recommended that the UC begin developing its own test, which would be designed to meet the needs of both students and the institution.
[1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/...
If it is the link in the chain which makes sure the disparity is carried on, especially to bigger amplifiers like college admission, then the decision to abandon it is clear.
You do realize that it is possible for it to be both right?
The question is whether or not it helps more than it hurts and no one seems to care that it helps the students from poorer areas distinguish themselves.
College sports is a racket though for sure.
That USED to be line line but it has since changed: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...
No amount of expensive tutors is going to help a rich kid on the SAT unless they really do all the work.
The parent comment is saying that with the SAT removal, the only hard number the admissions officers have left to use is GPA. And GPA is just as gameable, if not even moreso than SAT scores, for kids with wealthy parents.
That won't work.
The whole point is this is social engineering to ensure that demographics at universities match demographics at large.
Truly random admissions won't guarantee that especially when the applicant pool doesn't match the demographics at large to begin with.
"There is only one group of students who are “overrepresented,” to use the chilling language of social engineering, at the university: Asian Americans. Twelve percent of K–12 students are Asian or Pacific Islander, compared with 34 percent of UC undergraduates. Aligning enrollment with state demographics would require cutting the share of those students by almost two-thirds. It would mean getting right with contemporary concepts of anti-racism by reviving one of California’s most shameful traditions: clearing Asians out of desirable spaces.
[...]
The UC has an established history in this dirty art. In the 1960s, Asian enrollment at UC Berkeley was strong, and it soared through the ’70s. But in the ’80s, it plummeted mysteriously. Berkeley was investigated by the Department of Education, and in 1989, the chancellor apologized and pledged that this would never happen again."
No one asserted that
In fact, the person you responded was asserting that this course of action is meant to deny access to members of certain groups because of their membership in a group, not that they are entitled to access because of their membership in a group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_foreigner
Honestly, standardized test scores and some case study type questions would be sufficient to make a decision (along with 1 on 1 convos). I hope a decision like this opens a channel for smart people to get to employment without having to go to school or spend as much time in it.
Edit:
Some people are commenting that relying on scores from years ago can unfairly disadvantage people who have improved since then, and can generally be misleading. I agree with that.
There should be a robust ecosystem of aptitude tests that are generally accepted, are as unbiased (culturally) as possible, and that can be retaken at any time.
I think it's developing, as I've seen some examples of this in the hiring process.
EDIT: Don't understand the downvotes. I went to a top liberal arts college and they told us to, if it was over a certain number. It worked broadly speaking.
It was also the place with the densest collection of high-achieving, highly intelligent colleagues that I’ve ever experienced.
What even is the point of living if society deems people like me to be inherently inferior for life?
If you saw my resume you’d understand how hopeless it is for people like me. It’s depressing.
I did not do well on my SATs (1500/1600) - do you think there's any way to make up for this? Or am I supposed to be as unimpressive as I was at 17 forever?
[1]https://www.thoughtco.com/sat-scores-for-ivy-league-admissio...
I've almost never heard of anyone caring about their SAT scores since freshman/sophomore year of college. The only people who still talk about them are the people who did really well on them complaining that they didn't help get them jobs once they graduated.
You say you don't understand the hate for SAT, but then proceed with an example of how you did better than your ex-gf in college despite doing presumably worse on the SAT then her?
No SAT, no admission, I think would have been the case for me.
To kinda bounce of your comment and replies, no, I don't think the SAT is racist in any way.
However, I don't think it's a particular useful metric by itself.
I had a near perfect SAT score (sans all this private tutoring people are talking about), but was an absolutely terrible college student. Just wasn't for me, and despite trying twice, I never really got anywhere. I wish I hadn't spent the money. And I hope I didn't prevent someone who was truly more motivated an opportunity in doing so.
This means wealthy families are substantially advantaged in SAT test performance. As a measure of preparation more than potential it may well serve as strong indicator future academic participation, but for all the wrong reasons. As such it can be used as a tool for exclusivity as a measure of anything.
To adequately test for performance biases aside divergent tests are better than conforming tests. The difference is the former tests for answer distribution, quantity, and validity where the later asserts correctness by asserting one answer against a single approved answer.