Universities these days seem to contain a lot of social gangs, roaming around, looking to see where they can exert power and influence. Generally through outrage and cancelling of others. Truly, this is not what university is supposed to be.
> Postgraduate students at Magdalen College have voted to remove a portrait of the monarch based on a photograph by Dorothy Wilding, taken in 1952, at the time she was crowned.
> The portrait, purchased in 2013 by students to decorate the Middle Common Room (MCR), the room that houses them, has been removed because it was an unwelcoming symbol of the UK's "recent colonial history".
Something about slavery, idk
> An Oxford University college has decided to keep its statue of a Barbados-born slave owner.
> All Souls College has dropped the name Christopher Codrington from its library
The concept of audible clapping
> Representatives from the Student Union (SU) passed a motion last week to replace clapping with “jazz hands” in hopes that this will make events “more inclusive” and “accessible” for those with the mental health condition.
> This comes after the University of Manchester made international headlines for passing a similar motion in September 2018.
In general it seems we import a lot of cultural nonsense from other Anglo countries even if its not quite relevant.
Granted, there are certainly tankie students in US colleges - but they don't usually run official Twitter accounts of student societies endorsed by the college. It reminded me more of the kind of stuff Orwell was writing about the UK intelligentsia in 1945:
"The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice. One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
So I think there's plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the Atlantic. ~
UC Berkeley in particular has embarrassed itself and the legacy of Free Speech by hissing, screaming attacks on several individuals in public, to drown out their voices. Combine that with other very active culture-wars elements (not mentioned now) and this grand institution is now wetting the bed, so to speak.
Yes, actually. If they want to convey an idea, it's not onerous to ask them to not scream in the process. If they are doing it solely to intimidate, that's not protected free speech.
I too made that assumption before reading the article. But after reading it, that does not seem like making the wealthy the new "woke" nemesis. They much rather seek to uncover institutional corruption, where donations to a college yield better chances for your kid in getting accepted.
Let's not kid ourselfs that is not a wild conspiracy or some socialist agenda. Ending corruption is in everybodies interest, except you are planing to yourself profit from that system by making strategic donations in your offsprings interest.
My kids are both university students right now. One at the state "flagship" university, the other at a regional campus. I ask them about things that I read in the news about higher ed. Basically, they're aware of this stuff, and have opinions on it, but it hasn't really affected them.
That’s definitely how right wing media portrays them. The reality is quite a lot more varied and nuanced. You should talk to some undergrads if you can! You may be surprised that things aren’t as you’ve been told.
Yep same about police actions. Sometimes they are in the wrong and abuse their power, but for the most part they’re doing their job, but if you listen to the media they’re at war with poor people.
I don’t need the media to see that. For one, I lived it as a poor person. For another, not being poor anymore, I still see it on a practically daily basis when I’m at the office.
The problem with police brutality is not that it’s commonplace, but that there are no repercussions for it. If blatantly abusive cops were held accountable the issue would not be as problematic.
I remember back when the PoliceOne forums were public. They eventually made it invite-only because reading that stuff for a few minutes was quite sufficient to reach this conclusion with no media in the picture.
Alternatively, if you subscribe to your police / sheriff department FB or Twitter feed or whatever they have, they will often post news about training their staff at such-and-such academy or training center. Looking those places up and reading about what they teach, exactly, can be very illuminating - "killology", for example.
Oh the halcyon days when all we wanted to do was study to get good grades and get out while ignoring the partying and fun by the Greek sisterhood and brotherhood campus orgs.
Social and class cliques are a real thing. The so-called networking benefits at elite schools like Princeton and Stanford don’t translate as well or as often to poor students, for example.
your bias is showing here -- guaranteed plenty of elite athletes, intellectual talents, hard workers or charismatic individuals have a whole new life after participating in those places or others.
That's literally what university has been for hundreds of years if not since medieval times. Practically any social movement or organisation of relevance can trace their roots back to an academic society largely from elite schools.
Not really. A couple of generations ago, you could attend a US state college and pay off the tuition by working summer jobs. Now, due to a long list of factors, colleges attempt to extract every nickel out of parents/students. I don't have the reference on my finger tips, but universities are employing AI algorithms to achieve this. In turn, parents have to hire consultants to get advice on bargaining the tuition price down -- in sum, an arms race.
I went to a cal state and paid 7k a year in tuition. 3 years later I am making around 300k TC at a FAANG. Everyone who graduated with me seems to be doing pretty well judging by LinkedIn.
I know quite a few people who went to various California public colleges and universities and earn that much. In tech, it's the choice of major, not the university, that really matters -- and even companies that have policies of only hiring from certain universities tend to apply that only to new grads.
I know several people who have succeeded in tech in staff+/leadership roles without any college degree at all!
In law, and medicine, and academia in general? Sure, your pedigree matters. But in tech, and in many engineering fields, a state school degree is all you need.
The reality is that most CS programs even in mid tier state schools weed out the worst to the point that the average grad is definitely making well over 100K per year 2 years out of school.
I saw this with my own school. I have a hard time finding any graduates from my program who aren't gainfully employed right now.
Sure, that's the point: most get weeded out. Whether that is in freshman year of college, or kids struggling with calc 1 in their senior year of high school.
CS degrees aren't like business degrees. It's much harder. Hence, many don't do it, despite the huge financial advantages of doing it.
i mean, if all the smart kids from poor, middle and upper middle classes (who are basically the powerhouses who create new research, build new companies etc...) stopped putting these universities on a pedestal, they wouldn't have much leg to stand on. As it stands, humans are basically pretty amoral, they only cry if they are disadvantaged, and they forget all about unfairness if they become the lottery winners.
Let’s be careful with this kind of thinking. I accepted federal funding in the form of student loans, should they get full transparency for everything in my life as well?
I drive on federally funded roads, should they get recording devices to see and hear my every move?
To the people complaining about this: this is actually a very positive development that I welcome and you should too. This entire time, elite U.S. colleges have been carefully steering conversations about admissions in the direction of racial quotas, to avoid talking about how by far the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements. If you want to make college admissions more fair, attacking those is way more bang for your buck than anything to do with race, and now some students are not falling for the distraction anymore and asking to see behind the curtain.
Expect colleges to fight this much, much harder than they ever did for anything related to affirmative action, because this is actually hitting them where it hurts.
I agree but I’m always wondering how admissions departments and those who are in charge benefit from donations. I understand bribery, but this is a bit different. If the money goes to universities for a donation, do people somehow get rewarded for this?
It's all about access - donate money, get your children into a place where they can have access to political and professional networks. That's the University of Southern California admissions scandal.
More money gets you a voice in hiring committees where you can set the tone of the department and shape political discourse. The Koch brothers (those people again) did that very successfully with George Mason University when they transformed what was a commuter college into a megaphone for libertarian ideas.
> It's all about access - donate money, get your children into a place
There is also a flip side to this coin, which is why universities usually call this the “development” office.
If you are going to give money away, you are very likely to give it to an organization to which you have some sort of affinity to. Universities are actively trying to cultivate that affinity so they can capture some or all of your charitable spending. And they really, really don’t want any donor to know how much they’ve been manipulated. Many people really believe that their child earned their admission letter based on merit.
Used to work in a university, pretty close to the data. The Alumni & Donations people played things very close to the chest, to the point of near irrational paranoia (wait, you want us to give alumni access to this stuff but ... not let us know who the alumni are?), so I think the fight for this kind of information is going to be quite intense.
The charitable read is that large donations and perennial benefactors are good for the school, and admissions considers the welfare of the school in addition to other factors.
> U.S. colleges have been carefully steering conversations about admissions in the direction of racial quotas, to avoid talking about how by far the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements.
A lesson that generalizes well. Remember Occupy Wall Street, Piketty's tome, the Bernie primaries? It all feels like distant history now.
Only if you have been led to believe any of those things were popular.
Occupy Wall Street had participants that counted at most 30,000 cumulatively across demonstrations in NY and surrounding areas. Impressive number? Not in my opinion.
Admittedly, I have no idea what the hell 'Piketty's tome' is, so I won't talk about it, seems like its related to a few books that sold 1.5m copies, pretty successful, that's it from me for now though.
Bernie in 2016 received ~43% of the vote in democratic primaries, in 2020 he slipped down to ~26%, neither times was he close. Hillary received ~55% in 2016, Joe received ~51% in 2020. Opinion polls consistently put Hillary far above Bernie throughout the entire election season. In 2020, Joe also had the highest approval rating amongst candidates in DNC, only dropping for a few weeks where admittedly Bernie had higher approval, but then dropped it when it really mattered.
So you'll have to point to me where exactly these people are popular, maybe within their own world? Maybe by spending? That only works for Bernie, not for Occupy Wall Street which was a very minor event by all measures. Can't speak to Picketty, so I will leave that undecided on my end, and let you define it's success.
Note, I am far from a Democrat or a Socialist, in fact I'm Republican through and through.
43% of the vote in democratic primaries is quite popular.
And Bernie is a great example because identity politics was specifically used against him; his supporters were derided as mostly white male "Bernie Bros".
Sounds like exactly what GP was talking about: steering conversations to race and sex to avoid talking about economic inequality.
> And Bernie is a great example because identity politics was specifically used against him; his supporters were derided as mostly white male "Bernie Bros".
And the abiding irony of that was that most of the people who did that supported Elizabeth Warren, who had vanishingly little support from actual minorities. She finished behind Tom Steyer in South Carolina and behind Mayor Pete in Nevada (states where the democratic base is heavily black and hispanic, respectively).
Even the New York Times acknowledged that Warren's campaign was a "demographic cul-de-sac" dominated by "college-educated white people." And those people had the gall to paint Bernie--who has invested enormous time and energy in reaching out to Hispanics and did well among that group--as racist.
All that aside, it seems like the original point being made was roughly that Occupy and Bernie were popular causes among young and online people, but not among the broader electorate. And that's basically true, right?
It seems to me that 43% support among Democrat primary voters is fairly broad, but I guess that's just a debate about semantics.
I would argue, however, that he faced tremendous opposition from the wealthy, and that translated into most corporate media either attacking him or ignoring him, so his supporters could only be heard on social media.
Look at the Michigan county-by-county primary results (better yet: compare 2020 to 2016) and tell me that Democratic Socialism is a viable position in the modern Democratic party. Sanders didn't even take Washtenaw this go-round. I think it's very likely that Sanders overperformance in 2016 was really an artifact for a lot of deep-seated dislike and distrust of Hillary Clinton (something Biden himself was reported sour about in the wake of the 2016 fiasco).
Corporate opposition is a just-so story. Until his campaign fell apart, Sanders stomped Biden in earned media coverage.
I would say Sanders is popular, and not just among "online people." He won Nevada, including a decisive victory among Hispanics. The state as a whole is a working class state, and Hispanics there especially so. While he's not more popular than Biden, but he represents the only other "lane" in the Democratic Party that has meaningful purchase with actual voters, especially "not online" voters. And of course, let's not forget that anti-Wall Street, anti-corporate sentiment is emergent on the right as well--especially among persuadable voters and independents.
What isn't popular among voters, by contrast, is the woke managerialism lane Warren has come to represent. That's significant both because it points to how the party should recalibrate its message, and also because of its implications for the party's management structure (where the woke managerialists have outsize power). I suspect Democrats' reshuffling of the primaries will significantly ameliorate both problems.
I may have gotten myself in trouble here implying that Sanders is unpopular; he's not. He's just not viable. You can't win the Democratic nomination without the Black vote, and, for whatever reason, Sanders just wasn't able to connect there. It's academic now, of course; Sanders isn't going to run again.
I'm not a Warren fan either. I'm the weirdo in this conversation who was actually rooting for Biden.
Sanders fell apart among black voters in the south for a very good reason — he talked down to them as if he was the first person to think that talking to them about Socialism was a good idea, as if Paul Robeson or Bayard Rustin never existed. One of my (white) college classmates who was very heavily involved as a campaign worker for him told me, “Who are those people?” I said “Don’t look at me, it’s your campaign.”
That being said he was probably the only person who could’ve stopped the union workers in Ohio from flipping to Trump.
Sure, 43% seems popular. Until you compare it to 55%.
> And Bernie is a great example because identity politics was specifically used against him; his supporters were derided as mostly white male "Bernie Bros".
Really? I thought "Bernie Bros" were deemed the 'working class' as proclaimed by Bernie style 'Socialists' that model their economic ideals based on a fictional EU. This seems like it's rewriting history.
> Sounds like exactly what GP was talking about: steering conversations to race and sex to avoid talking about economic inequality.
Sure, which is what you did, on your own, through your own comment, I talked about popularity, you're in some weird area where you are vaguely on the same topic as I am but pretending like it is towards the point.
Bernie had no shot. Both times. If he runs again in 2024, which will be hilarious if he does, it will simply be to raise money for the DNC, just like he did the last 2 times. No refunds. Look at that, did not mention a single demographic other than 'he' in these short 2 sentences, maybe you're onto something with 'Bernie Bros'.
> Really? I thought "Bernie Bros" were deemed the 'working class' as proclaimed by Bernie style 'Socialists' that model their economic ideals based on a fictional EU. This seems like it's rewriting history.
"Robinson Meyer, a writer for The Atlantic, coined the term Bernie bro in an October 17, 2015 article to describe young, white, progressive men who, in his view, support unrealistic progressive policies"
And if you think this is all off topic, you must have missed this quote from the root of this thread:
> U.S. colleges have been carefully steering conversations about admissions in the direction of racial quotas, to avoid talking about how by far the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements.
IOW, steering conversations to race to avoid talking about class and economic inequality.
> Admittedly, I have no idea what the hell 'Piketty's tome' is,
Piketty is an economist who wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which is a book on economics and wealth inequality (essentially arguing that the rich are inevitably going to get richer absent government intervention).
And this will be very very good popcorn-munching drama.
I mean, I do think that students getting in because daddy gives a couple million isn't the end of the world.
The college I went to 20 years ago went away from need-blind admissions, which basically meant if you can pay you get some preference. Now THAT was bad, because it affected the general student population. If instead you have a reserved number of "bribe" students and that means pure-merit admissions can be done with the rest of the students, well, ok.
I love how admissions of athletes to play sports gets a total pass. Probably because it putatively is a good means for minorities to get into schools, even if they are separated off into purely sports training tracks and joke academics.
The real issue is the MBAs running the colleges as a profit industry. Except there's no profits, so they pay... themselves.
> I love how admissions of athletes to play sports gets a total pass. Probably because it putatively is a good means for minorities to get into schools, even if they are separated off into purely sports training tracks and joke academics.
And sadly, even if they succeed on this track into the world of professional sports, the joke academics and lack of financial training (if you had a financial education you would never play college sports anyway...) mean that they're set up to go broke and fail in life as soon as the injuries add up or their athletic ability is no longer exceptional to their peer group.
I don’t understand how being bought in with your parents money is ok yet an athelete actually doing a thing themselves with their own bodies shouldn’t “get a pass”. Especially given that they still have to, you know, pass classes!
Let’s not pretend all those legacies are showing up to class and working hard.
I think for the same weird reason why people tend to be OK with top athletes making billions while they are upset at Gates and Bezos. Don’t ask me what it is.
> the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements
From my personal experiences, I suspect the restriction of financial aid based on arbitrary cutoffs affects more people. I know several people who got into ivys, but didn't go because they didn't qualify for financial aid and chose not to take on large amounts of debt, coming from frugal lower/middle class families.
Imagine what would happen if colleges fired their admissions departments, set aside all considerations of wealth and race, and had a database admit students with a single query on a result of standardized test results ordered from highest score to lowest, accepting students in that order until the year's class was filled.
Are you suggesting that having people capable of scoring well on exams of common necessities for college education, like mathematics and language skills, is not desirable? The SAT is not a trivia test: a student who can pass a test on math up through precalculus is going to get more value out of college than one who does not understand algebra and has to spend time in remediation. I would much prefer to have a university exclusively populated by people good at solving math problems and comprehending readings than by people selected for their "good vibes" and to fit a diversity quota.
You didn’t address the comment you’re responding to. You won’t have students who are good at math and language skills. You’ll have students who are good at taking math and language skills standardized tests. Being good at math and being good at taking a math standardized test is two different things. A student can excel at math but be terrible at taking tests for many reasons. You’ll have bright students falling through the cracks if this was the only consideration for admission.
How do you know that this hypothetical student “excels” at math if their performance can’t be measured? Students can and are already given reasonable accommodations. Sure tests may be imperfect but I am highly skeptical of any claim that math test performance and academic math performance are not highly correlated.
At the levels we’re talking about, the difference between “perfect score” and “still excellent but imperfect score” can be down to one or two errors on the test, basically noise. Given the number of applicants and the willingness to drill testing skills, going by scores would eliminate anyone who makes a minor error. The ability to perform perfectly in high-stress situations is a useful (and learnable) skill - like the ability to win quiz games, or perform classical music at concert level - but it is not the same thing as academic potential.
(As an aside: as an advisor of PhD students in computer science, I sometimes have to train students out of these habits. Research doesn’t happen if you’re used to getting the shallow answer more quickly, or if you’re afraid to be wrong.)
Yes, and that’s one of the reasons why tests are imperfect. That doesn’t mean that introducing any additional variables is warranted, especially given their associated noise. GPA is garbage, for example, which is why I ignore it on resumes. If the test has unacceptably high variance as you mentioned, the solution is to make the test longer not discount it.
I see no evidence that making tests longer will optimize for the variables that matter in academic performance (which are not 1-dimensional anyway) as opposed to simply optimizing for people who have poured resources into test preparation.
You seem to be coming from the perspective that testing must be the best metric, and then trying to develop a methodology based on that assumption. Purely as a thought exercise: it might be helpful to start from the assumption that testing isn’t an option, and think about what you might do instead.
I took the SAT decades ago, so the predictive nature of the SAT may have changed since — but I doubt that it has changed that much.
At that time, the SAT was good at predicting the likely performance of a prospective college student … for one term. That’s it. I got an excellent score on my SAT (not a perfect score, but I thought that it was a bullshit measure — which, like all standardized testing, it is — so I didn’t care). I did well in my first term, and then not so well after that (I ended up doing fine in the end, but it took longer to get through a degree program because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up; I think that Americans, by and large, put too much focus on going to university too early and we would be better served by an extra year of high school and/or a gap year).
One other thing I remember from that time period is that a better predictor of overall success in school was NOBITH, the Number Of Bathrooms In The House. That is, socioeconomic indicators were a better predictor than anything else, including nonsense standardized tests like the SAT. And given that socioeconomic indicators are a better indicator, that is a strong indication that there’s seriously wasted potential at all levels of eduction because we mistakenly equate family socioeconomics with success in general.
That's how University of California admissions used to work for the most part. The formula was:
Weighted GPA * 1000 + SAT Score + SAT II English + SAT II Math + max(remaining SAT II scores)
Then they ordered everyone by that number, and if say they were offering 5000 kids admission, the top 2500 would automatically get an offer letter. Then they would work their way down the list reading essays and adding bonuses for things like growing up in a rural area or an underfunded district with fewer AP classes.
They would then just keep admitting people until they hit 5000 offers.
Then they got accused of racism because that process ended up overweighting Whites and Asians compared to the applicant pool for all the top schools.
There is/was a lot of debate on why Whites and Asians did better, but when you dug in it turned out they tended to almost all be upper-middle class or wealthy. So basically it was wealth and systemic racism, masked by "standardized testing".
Also it should be noted that wealthy people had a better chance at a higher weighted GPA because their schools offered more AP courses.
This was going so well until the pivot in the last two paragraphs.
Is admitting the most capable students unfair? It is inherently discriminatory based on their knowledge and ability, which seems is what people want, but it also means that having more resources to be better equipped aka better nurture, which tends to positively influence individual's prospects, is suddenly something many are not okay with?
Obviously, the SAT tests are flawed one way or another. But then again, they don't care for students' superficial characteristics.
If not that, then implied statement is very reminiscent to slogans used in USSR or during cultural revolution in China.
Are they actually the most capable students, or did they just have a better chance of getting higher scores on the arbitrary metrics chosen? And if so, why did they have a higher chance?
There is a difference between better nurture and lack of opportunity. It's true, we shouldn't be correcting for lack of opportunity at the college admissions level, we should be doing it at the elementary level and younger.
But it's a lot easier to correct it at the college admissions level, which is a good choke point in one's life path, so for now, that is where the focus is.
Would different test-based or merit-based metrics radically change the result? After all, isn't the purpose of a holistic approach to college admissions basically to make the criterion not one of any measurement of quality merit, but of belonging to the right demographic mix that the college seeks to attain?
Further, why should colleges try to correct for lack of opportunity? Their job is to educate people, and not everyone is apt for higher education. Admitting a student with poor mathematical abilities into a rigorous engineering program is just setting that student up for failure, not recompensing him for opportunities lost or squandered earlier.
Additionally, if we are to expect that much of our political, economic, and technical elite are to pass through these institutions - and, further, that such institutions will trade explicitly on their ability to produce this elite - then there is an inherent public interest in the character of their operations. It's simply a matter of accountability.
You've accidental confused achievement and ability.
A student who goes to a poor school who offers zero AP classes will always achieve lower weighted GPAs than students who go to wealthy schools that offer many AP classes. No amount of individual achievement will overcome that mathematical disadvatnage.
Racism comes into when, because of racism, it just so happens that schools who are well funded and can give that advantage are overwhelmingly white, and schools who are are poorly funded and cannot give that advantage are overwhelmingly non-white.
Suggesting that a student who is "placed above his or her station" into an elite program is setup for failure is a favorite of a few SCOTUS Justices, but in fact is not supported by evidence. Graduation and other metrics of success are not strongly correlated to past attainment, primarily because most programs have already had to deal with achievement inequities, and the most successful programs already have mechanisms to even out unequal prior achievement. Virtually all programs that have elite programs already have a substantial apparatus dedicated to filling achievement gaps between incoming students.
The larger question of "what is the purpose of college" and "is it to educate people" is bigger than this thread, but shouldn't be overlooked. For schools that are publicly funded in whole or part, there should be a larger mission than sending young adults through an educational meat grinder. The public mission of public universities should absolutely have a social justice component.
There is absolutely no doubt that we could design an education system which, at an early age, divides and tracks students towards a successful and high level of attainment. By ruthlessly focusing resources on those children with the best chances of success, and minimizing resources expended on those with lower changes of success, the system could produce many multiples of positive outcomes than we do now, but at the cost of many more left with almost no attainment. Our present distribution of resources, in the US, is haphazardly assembled and produces a balance of outcomes, but is by no means optimized for any particular set of outcomes.
A student with a full family and access to tutors, with better mental health and social situation will be able to score significantly better.
However, the downside to "solving" this is significantly worse. By giving a headstart to students based on their superficial or socioeconomical characteristics creates perverse incentives in the system and disconnects it from a selection process.
Usually, countries that are not US solve this by providing free tutorships or lectures to aspiring students, scholarships and a fixed quota of free placements in the admission for top performing students (each country may have their own flavour of the policy, but the main thing they !fortunately! did not use to be based on race or gender).
It is usually much better, in my personal opinion, to provide the "help" to those who seek it rather than trying to equalize for outcome. Poor upbringing can and usually does damage and incapacitates individuals to an extent. But any movement among the lines of "not having issues or being better prepared means you have to do more work" explicitly discourages the optimal behaviour, incentivizing victim-hood and demoralizes individuals which did use the opportunities available to them or managed to create ones.
Again, and I cannot stress this enough, communism is bad.
I agree with you. This should not be solved at the college admissions level. Resources should be provided to younger students with potential to equalize there. But it's still better than doing nothing at all.
> Again, and I cannot stress this enough, communism is bad.
Again I agree with you. But I'm not sure how that's relevant. Changing the way we do college admissions isn't communism.
In fact, admitting students purely based on test scores is something that happens in communist countries.
> Are they actually the most capable students, or did they just have a better chance of getting higher scores on the arbitrary metrics chosen? And if so, why did they have a higher chance?
They are the most capable. You call them abitrary, without stating what makes them arbitrary. Until you prove they're arbitrary, your opinion isn't worth addressing.
Ironically present-day Chinese college admissions are arguably far more meritocratic than American college admissions. The main factor is performance on the Gaokao exam, an 8 hour test which dwarfs the SAT’s 3 hours.
The problem with any standardized test is that it can be gamed with enough practice/resources that poor people are way less likely to be able to access. So it's not a cure-all, there are tradeoffs.
Standardized tests are the least game-able metric. In NYC poor Chinese immigrants manage to scrounge together $900 for an SAT prep class. It is much harder for them to figure out what some white college administrator wants to hear in a diversity essay. Or to get a job at some non-profit in China working on some social justice effort appealing to white college administrators.
Standardized testing isn’t perfectly meritocratic, but everything else is worse.
Absolutely. The cost of SAT prep courses are very small in comparison to the immeasurable cost of a lifetime of culture and experience that are necessary to impress an admissions board during an essay or interview. This is why it’s so absolutely disgusting to me to find that schools tended to rate Asian students so low on “personality scores”.
As a side note, I haven’t found any more detailed breakdown of the personality scoring results. Asia is a very diverse place and Asian ethnic groups in the US range from the very richest to some of the poorest.
But it is still the fairest option we have. Any other metric is usually much more gameable. Be it sports, essay writing, extra curriculars, volunteering?!?!? and so on.
Or maybe alternative is truly random or negative wealth scoring. That is only the poorest students get entry and everyone else will have to figure out something else.
Grades and standardized test scores might be one of the least interesting and almost definitely one of the less effective ways to classify the “most capable” students.
If I’m optimizing for students who do cool stuff, force marching them into relatively banal optimization tasks is counterproductive.
Strongly agree with the sentiment. In fact, I alluded to this in the parent response by mentioning that SAT and most other testing systems will be always flawed. The question itself was posed with testing criteria issues notwithstanding.
With that said, I think modern education system can no longer scale and has outlived its usefulness. The future is with LLM-driven tutors which can somewhat alleviate the scaling issues inherent to "apprenticeship". Personally, as an ADHD individual it was always drastically easier to study under a person who gives you dedicated attention that for any of my peers. By a wide margin. And yet, studying for local SAT equivalent was an insurmountable task involving acquiring a lot of knowledge and skills that were useless outside of passing the test.
The sad thing is that students from poorer and racially segregated areas are paying for 18 years of falling behind by the time it comes to college. When some high schools have barely literate graduates betrayed by adverse conditions their whole life, it's hardly shocking that it results in college admission readiness being grossly skewed. Not that I want to oversimplify.
And why not fix this issue? There is multiple options. You could build something like large prisons somewhere. Ship all the kids there from age 6 to 18. And then shuffle them randomly around every 6 months. Thus ensuring everyone gets exactly same experience and education. Equity for everyone!
It would be more constructive to improve teacher education, wages, and standards to create a more productive and better resourced education system.
You could look to countries such as Finland et al for a model rather than drawing upon satirical dystopian ankle deep in thought Harrison Bergeron scenarios.
I'd start with making property tax go to a central pool before getting distributed back to schools instead of letting the wealth stay concentrated in wealthy districts that have often been formed mostly to avoid sharing revenues with less affluent areas.
Would be interesting to see what would happen if they applied that formula per each high school, not per graduating body, with each high school getting some guaranteed college slots. Maybe poorer schools would get more attention this way.
It would be a lot worse. Harvard could fill its classes 4x over with students with perfect SATs and GPAs. They would miss out on the ones who published ground breaking biology papers, wrote code for important open source projects, etc.
It would also put a ton of pressure on high school students to get perfect scores, creating a ton more stress than they already have. And at the expense of much more valuable things they could be doing with their time.
The current system has issues, but there are worse ways to do things.
This suggests to me that the SAT isn’t hard enough then. That many students should not be able to get perfect scores.
The number of high school or undergrads who wrote groundbreaking biology papers is vanishingly small, but you do raise a good point. There’s a chicken and egg problem. Because schools aren’t just weighting test scores (because the score is flawed) there is incentive to work on other, more subjective things.
> This suggests to me that the SAT isn’t hard enough then
That’s tricky. In a massive country with many incredible students, it seems to me that it’s going to be possible for the top .1% of students to do as well as is possible on any reasonable exam.
Diminishing returns, really. As you continually test the margins will get smaller and smaller and the outcomes won't change much. Someone scoring >1500 on the SAT will likely just as well graduate from ivy league as someone who scored 1550.
Someone with a 1300 would do fine. But only because thy aren't as difficult as top schools should be because, as we see from their admissions policies, they are status and credentialing gatekeepers to elite status, not really top educational institutions.
You are describing the French elitist educational system until maybe 15y ago. This counterintuitively resulted in very little diversity.
There might be natural reasons for that but there were also clearly some perverse effects: because those exams became effectively competitive exams (fixed number of seats available), they require intense preparation in preparatory schools which became the educational equivalent of a 2-3y navy seal bootcamp (it's not enough to have good grades, you need the best grades). Teachers in poor area high schools were often unfamiliar and intimidated by this system (they didn't go through it themselves), and were actively discouraging good students from taking that path. Students not having educated parents who knew the system were not pushed to work really hard to get into, and survive that system either. And you ended up with 80%-90% of the kids in those colleges coming from families from similar colleges. Money wouldn't be a major factor, the top colleges and preparatory schools are free.
Now the natural ratio shouldn't be 3-5% (elite college educated parent as % of general population), probably around 50-60%, certainly not 80-90%.
For the past 15y, France has opted to break the thermometer instead, ie to bypass those exams for the majority of the recruitment, and to select students on file which grants them full latitude for subjectivity. I suspect they also nationalised the selection process of those preparatory schools (not super familiar with the latest developments). I think the main consequence is that those elite colleges will quickly lose their prestige, and it might actually be the unstated intention, i.e. converge to a german like education system where the name and prestige of the university matters little vs the profile of the student.
It might be a good thing or perhaps it will just ruin the french educational system, it's hard to tell.
I think it would work better with a slight twist: set a reasonable score floor, run a lottery for everyone above it. Instead of giving the world to people who(se parents have paid to) optimize their studies to a particular test, everyone who proves a certain degree of capability has a chance. Students simply do their best, and fate and the RNG takes care of the rest. If it becomes a problem, that we're underserving too many bright and promising youth because too few are getting into Ivies under this regime... maybe create more Ivy-likes (Stanford says hi).
And for anyone who thinks it's unfair: not anymore so than the parent lottery. And I think institutional acknowledgment of the role pure dumb luck plays in our lives would go a long way towards dispelling our inclination to actively punish people for acts of the cosmos and/or dysfunctional policy.
You are spot on. I'm a middle-class student who played the game to get into one of the six schools mentioned in this article. It was immediately obvious that the "diversity" of my school came from a large number of dual citizens living a life of luxury and privilege. Racial quotas were a red carpet for the international elite who spoke the same language and shared the same life experiences regardless of their race, whether they came from anti-Democratic countries or upstate New York. These same individuals got special platforms to talk about adversity while I went to bed hungry. I am grateful for the financial aid that was given to me, and I will always appreciate the large endowment that supported this, but I hope the admissions system gets exposed for what it is.
This reminded me of something back when I was in high school in my Latin American country. There used to be this locally known international university-application-consultant and one of the things he mentioned for the "satisfaction guaranteed" of his services was being familiar on which Universities needed to increase their Latin American demographics and how to use that in the applicant's favor to increase the chances of a successful college and scholarship application. This was mostly targeted to students at bilingual or international schools whose families were already wealthier than average.
> shared the same life experiences regardless of their race
Where I grew up bilingual/international school students live in an isolated bubble separate from the rest of students. So they grow up with the study plans, standardized tests, music, tv shows and pop culture from their international school's country.
So probably that's why their life experience might have been more similar to those in the U.S. This is only a small fraction of the students though.
For example a high school student from American School of my country might know about the SAT test prep, Ivy applications, college application essay writing, and be familiar with US issues. All of those which would be mostly unknown by students outside that circle. Making others less likely to successfully apply.
The degree to which the elite institutions have managed to co-opt the left by playing identity progressives against economic progressives is both brilliant and scary. They've managed to paint adding some privileged, Ivy League educated minorities to corporate boards as progressive victories on behalf of minority groups who mostly don't even attend college. Meanwhile there has been zero progress on adding workers to corporate boards, which would do far more to advance the material and social interests of those same minority groups.
On the other hand, Elizabeth Warren, the apotheosis of the elite institutional left you're talking about, ran for president on a platform of getting workers onto boards, and got absolutely crushed.
It's possible that race simply has more charge than class does, regardless of the axiomatic arguments people have for why it should be the other way around.
That assumes people read platforms, which I think is incorrect. Warren got maneuvered by the media and activists into a "woke white lady with a plan" lane that just turned out to be a total loser. If she had campaigned on the worker stuff and didn't call people "Latinix" I think she would've done far better.
If you had to reduce each candidate to three bullet points, "workers" wouldn't have made the list for Warren, but trying to stab the leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the back with a cheap accusation of sexism certainly would have made the list.
Clearly there is a large constituency for class-oriented progressivism. Sanders wouldn't have been able to win California, Nevada, and Colorado, and hold his own in Texas, otherwise. What Warren proves is that adding identity politics to the mix is a losing proposition, even in the Democratic Party.
I doubt that it helps their antitrust allegation move forward if they cannot also show that students were denied for needing financial aid, but it might shake some things loose.
Isn’t part of the benefit of getting into these universities the fact that you get to interact with people from a wealthier economic class? You have the opportunity to meet people who can invest in your ventures or who can introduce you to people who can.
If you dont give the wealthy an unfair seat then they will not be in that university.
Instead they will be forced to go to another private school which will receive their endowments, and soon grow to the point they can compete with elite schools. Harvard, et all will still be good schools but not the "best" schools that people die to get into.
While the universities can completely do that, they can't get an antitrust exception while they do. That's the issue here, I think. The universities are colluding with one another as regards pricing and financial aid. This was allowed under an exception to antitrust law so long as financial aid played no role in admissions. The group is alleging that financial aid, or the lack of it, plays a role in admitting rich students. If that's the case, it's possible (but not anywhere close to certain) that the universities don't qualify for the antitrust exception.
As I understand it they aren't entirely, but Section 568 of the Higher Education Act lets them communicate and act together for the purposes of determining some guidelines around financial aid.
> You have the opportunity to meet people who can invest in your ventures.
and who are also completely lacking empathy for the financially challenged at best, disregard and look down upon the less privileged at worst. Both may lead to social isolation of persons with different socioeconomic background attending said schools.
You can be middle class or upper middle class and have that viewpoint if you've had insufficient exposure to people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
Try gambling (say, poker) with the ultra rich. They don't really give a shit win or lose because they like the entertainment, but they _absolutely hate_ to lose to someone who needs the money. For one, that money is never coming back to the table for them to win back later, and two, that person was playing for completely different stakes as the rest of the table and actually "got over" on them.
If you even want to get into such games, having the money isn't enough. You need the aura that it's small stakes to you. Multiple cash game hustlers have written about this phenomenon.
do you mean how each person gambles distinguishes each person's nature, or the fact of gambling puts you in the nature of being a gambler and says other things about your personality?
- people from less privileged background didn't need empathy. By being there, they were bound to have a successful career
- students tend to get along better with people from similar background/interest but there were enough diversity so that nobody felt they didn't belong, and nobody was looked down.
That being said, we don't have as much inequalities as in the US and also no quota/positive discrimination. Everybody who was there passed the same selective anonymous exams, which I think is very important. I can see why US students who benefited from favorable admissions criteria are looked down or suffer from imposter syndrome.
Oh knock it off. I’m not wealthy but I’m sick of this trope where we assume rich people are jerks. It’s a lazy, unintelligent critique, and what’s more, your comment shows that even non-wealthy people can be jerks too.
It’s an empirically sound assumption to make, especially when it comes to people who are products of wealthy lineage a few generations back and have barely worked.
> It’s a lazy, unintelligent critique
I think this is what a subset of people belonging to lower socioeconomic classes tell themselves, and sometimes have heard it from their “superiors”, to better cope with their financial struggle. The poor people are just lazy is the motto of the privileged and is also a safe assumption to make for a rich person to have.
It may be incomplete but your next sentence about inheritance is actually what's poor judgement on your part.
I didn't mention direct inheritance in my previous comment, however it's really hard to make any distinction between this and the fact that being born in the 'right' family means access to professional/educational opportunities due to specific connections almost never easily attainable by the ordinary mortals. And yes, this often means, especially in professional settings, getting away with doing the bare minimum and staying on the job just because the boss was in high school with your shipowner dad.
> What percentage of millionaires inherited their wealth?
This is a really problematic way to address the effect of inheritance has on one's wealth since such percentages are relied on self-reports, which means that effectively all will identify as self-made. I find it entertaining, but also telling about the brainwashing the financially desperate have suffered, people like Elon Musk being cited as self-made when they always happen to come from financially privileged families.
Seems like a pretty crappy design if the goal is to 'perpetuate class hierarchies', considering that they replace nepotism as a system for filling important roles in society. Hard to be more insular than that.
It's the other way around. People from poorer backgrounds are brought in for the education of the rich students. It's like a zoo. Or it's so the rich students can take advantage of your talents once you leave.
Not really, wealthy students alone don’t make or break elite schools. Yale for example doesn’t have nearly the reputation of Harvard even though 5 presidents went to Yale etc.
In the end it’s the non wealthy students that make or break a schools reputation which is why schools give out scholarships etc. It’s a pure transaction your future achievements aid us and our reputation and resources aid you.
Schools also specialize so Harvard doesn’t have nearly the reputation in say animation as CalArts etc.
My experience as a very poor student at elite university is that the classes don’t mix much, though there maybe exceptions for a standout athlete on a team sport.
Part of it is logistics: wealthy had money for weekend ski trips, cars, didn’t have to work student jobs so had more free time.
Maybe it’s changed? I was there over a decade ago.
The last time this sort of class-awareness trend got started in America was Occupy Wall Street, and the corporate media killed it by platforming and showcasing the looniest most alienating fringes of that movement, starting the descent into the 'racist' style of progressive activism which most of the public find alienating (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...)
I think they'll do it again. If this movement finds legs and makes itself hard to ignore, then the corporate media will once again use their editorial powers to shift the conversation away from the class narrative, probably again in the direction of divisive race politics.
It was about the financial industry getting bailouts while the common man suffered from economic conditions caused by the financial industry being so reckless. But then the corporate media got their hands on it and the narrative became 'these loony hippies think that people should be ranked by privilege'. Most Americans had never heard of the "Progressive stack" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack ) before, and this alienated the movement. In essence, the corporate media promoted intra-class war to preempt inter-class war.
Indeed. The historically proven and repeated best method to kill any moment of social and political consciousness that unites multiple segments of society across race, class, and gender lines is to turn everyone’s attention to a new divisive identity politics—breaking down the common threads that bring people of vastly different backgrounds together to mutually support and advocate for each other.
Sadly, the weak left in the US falls for it every time, shrinking at each step, becoming incapable of providing a vision for a better future for all—because they all start fighting over who’s doing the identity politics thing better. The right uselessly plays into the new narrative by fighting over how much they should have to even care about the new identity politics, arguing for a return to the time before the identity politics became the dominant theme.
With both sides playing a pointless game, the damage is done—the fight that united people rarely returns with the same force it had before (as people exhaust themselves over divisive identity politics), and neoliberal dominance secures another decade or so of relative ease and impunity.
Hopefully Americans eventually are waking up and
realize that the actual oppressors can be any of race/gender identity/sexual orientation, but what they all have in common is revenue that either directly or indirectly cone from the exploitation of the masses.
I used to work in the admissions office of a top 5 school in the US.
I was naive and initially shocked by "the list" when I was told about it. A list of applicants who were the children of faculty, staff, very large benefactors, and politicians. They could NOT be denied by any admissions councilor without a very serious reason (eg. convicted of a violent crime).
I raised an eyebrow.
Then I discovered that that list accounted for a full 25% of EVERY incoming class. Literally hundreds of students per year.
I raised the other eyebrow.
Then I realized that the constant and extreme push for diversity recruiting was to obfuscate the obvious nepotism and secrecy in admissions. The remaining part of the incoming class had to vastly overachieve diversity metrics so anyone questioning admissions or seeking transparency could be easily demonized for being <insert insult>.
They will never ever EVER allow transparency in admissions.
Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.
At Harvard, low-income students with top academic scores had an admit rate of 24% compared to 15% for all other applicants, according to a 2013 study by the school. Harvard has said it believes enrolling a diverse student body is important because the school wants students to learn to work with people from different backgrounds.
“The middle class tends to get a little bit neglected,” said Hafeez Lakhani, a private college counselor in New York who charges $1,200 an hour. “Twenty years ago, Ms. Younger would have had a good shot at an Ivy League school.”
> Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Using just "white" is extremely misleading. Harvard undergraduates are already only 40% white [1], but 10% are Jewish [2] (despite being only 2% of the US population). Meaning non-Jewish whites, which are 56% of the US, are only 30% of Harvard undergraduates. For graduate students it's even more ridiculous - 53% Jewish, 28% non-Jewish white.
If one filter (not enrolled->enrolled) brings them from 2% to 10%*, it's not beyond possibility that another filter (graduate->undergraduate) would bring another 5x increase. But I'd guess 53% is probably at least a slight over-estimation, and the numbers may not be entirely reliable.
Perhaps we should ask for the diversity statistics to count Jewish numbers separately so we could have official numbers, but I suspect that might encounter some resistance :)
And at that point. I think it should be entirely open auction. 25% of incoming class going to highest bidder in order. Then that money would be used to lower tuition of the other 75%.
> The prospective class action filed last year against 17 schools alleged a price-fixing conspiracy in which schools restricted financial aid, causing a class of potentially more than 200,000 students to over-pay for tuition by tens of millions of dollars. The lawsuit survived an early bid by the schools to dismiss it.
What does this mean? They didn't qualify for student aid, they qualifed and were denied, or they went to a school, saw they could have paid less and were upset?
One school cuts their financial aid program, sucks but not illegal. Every school cuts their financial aid program, smells like price fixing. Students would have chosen a school with a more attractive financial aid program, which is a real effect — it’s super common to apply a bunch of similar schools and go to the one that gives you the most financial aid but the allegation is that all the programs dried up all at once and not going to college at all pretty much isn’t an option for a lot of fields.
Without some kind of intervention that prevents employers using college degrees for employment decisions we’re gonna be here a while.
> it’s super common to apply a bunch of similar schools and go to the one that gives you the most financial aid but the allegation is that all the programs dried up all at once and not going to college at all pretty much isn’t an option for a lot of fields.
Not going to one of the "elite" schools is, though, and it's not like financial aid disappeared at all the state schools.
The reputational difference between the state schools and the ivy league has been narrowing a lot in recent years in response to numerous scandals like this and a lot of improvement from the state schools. Is there any reason for the government to step in here, rather than just letting the ivy league continue to destroy its reputation?
Assuming it’s true, I think the government should step in because price fixing is illegal, really doesn’t matter who or why, and the students who paid more because of this scheme should be compensated.
And having all these schools’
names be dragged through the mud during the court proceedings will further your goal.
Is price fixing illegal? It’s applied very inconsistently. Farmers have their prices fixed. Shkreli wasn’t so lucky. During hurricanes it was illegal to raise prices. But Nixon enacted a price freeze too.
>The reputational difference between the state schools and the ivy league has been narrowing a lot in recent years in response to numerous scandals like this and a lot of improvement from the state schools.
The elite schools are considered "elite" not because they offer a better education, but because they ensure that your classmates will be valuable network contacts after you graduate.
From the perspective of the school, admitting people who are already wealthy/successful is preferable to admitting people who may become successful in the future. The school's status depends on having a disproportionately large population from the former group.
They act this way because the business world works similarly: you are more valuable if you are already on a first-name basis with high-level executives and politicals, because you can listen to the wind and bring your contacts in on the businesses that you are involved in.
All of that is a long-winded rephrasing of the old truism: it's not about what you know, but who you know.
> All of that is a long-winded rephrasing of the old truism: it's not about what you know, but who you know.
This is how organizations die, political, corporate, non-profit, or any other type. People who are good at knowing other people frequently aren’t the best person for the job, and selecting for newcomers who are good at knowing other people over work leads to aristocrats and manipulative sociopaths taking over, and then you have GE, a company that lost its ability to innovate, could only copy hot trends popular among Wall Street poorly, moved into finance and oil despite having no expertise in these fields to the tune of billion dollar losses, and is now a mess in the process of being broken up and dissolved.
On a much greater scale, Putin’s Russia works a lot like this, which has led it to become an incompetent brutal dictatorship that terrorizes its citizens and also can’t even take over Ukraine, one of the poorest country in Europe and its direct neighbor, because everyone who was competent got pushed out or killed.
No the students did receive aid and they probably received more aid than they would at almost any other school in the country. Of course there are cheaper sticker price options like in-state public universities, but specifically talking about the aid, it is quite good at elite schools. If people want to be mad about kids getting ripped off they should be mad at mediocre private U that has the same sticker price with a worse product and substantially worse aid packages.
Anyway the claim in the lawsuit about lost money is really just theoretical - most of the top schools collaborate in developing methods to determine how much aid a student should receive. The lawsuit is claiming that if the top schools could not "collude" on aid, students would have gotten more of it.
However I think that is a massive assumption that is not going to play out the way they would like. These schools reject 100s of qualified people every year that would gladly take a spot with current aid packages. There might be an occasional superstar that schools do compete over, but your average small town middle class 1600 SAT kid is super fucking replaceable.
Hell I could see aid being lower if schools didn't "collude", because being part of this need blind consortium is good PR. The lesser schools that give lesser aid are the ones that supposedly don't collude.
Legally it will be an interesting case though - the reason these schools are allowed to work together on aid package formulas is because they practice need blind admissions, which really only the top unis do. The lawsuit argues that admissions is not actually need blind, because of preferential admission for wealthy donors and some other admissions dynamics that are more common and inadvertently factor in wealth.
That makes this discovery highly relevant to the case, and while I think need blind status will be ultimately upheld, I'm sure the schools don't want the info getting out.
Interestingly, the initial lawsuit is based purely on public info and a handful of salty (unclear why) students. There isn't private info about people's aid packages or anything like that supporting it as far as I can find. I suspect the people suing realized they had an argument the schools weren't actually need blind, and that is what they actually wanted to challenge, so they dug up an argument about supposed low ball aid packages because the need blind schools form an aid consortium.
A lot of the articles about the lawsuit have left out critical details about what is actually being claimed, the claims make no sense until you realize this is actually about challenging need blind status. Here is an article that does touch on the key issues: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/us/financial-aid-lawsuit-...
> Lawyers for the schools said in a court filing that the "plaintiffs' goal in pursuing such discovery is to harass and embarrass, rather than because it is relevant to their actual antitrust claim."
> The defense lawyers also called the demand for admissions and development records "intrusive and burdensome."
Prediction: the schools lose, and have to turn over the data.
Maybe if their argument was on privacy of the donors, they'd have a chance. Saying "it's intrusive and burdensome" to ask us for this is utter BS that any judge should see through.
Discovery happens before a trial. The plaintiff gets to ask the defendant for relevant documents. This can be clearly weaponized—the plaintiff can request everything and make the defendant spend a lot of time and money on it. A common recourse is for the defense to argue the initial discovery request is overbroad and burdensome. Often there’s some negotiation but of course the judge makes the ultimate call. I won’t opine on the merits of this particular claim, but it’s a common claim.
It also works both ways. The defendant can dump all sorts of papers on the plaintiff and say, “be careful what you ask for, good luck wading through this!”
A nice curated authoritative spreadsheet/database wouldn’t be so much data.
What if such a data set doesn’t exist? What if it’s all in the email and word docs for these collegiate development and admissions departments over a decade? How do you tell it apart?
I guess the ace in their sleeve is that "harass and embarrass" rhymes. It sticks in your mind and will draw your attention every time you see or hear it being used. That's an easy 10x multiplier to the strength of the argument :).
It sounds like the issue isn't the wealth favoritism, it's that the colleges all explicitly state that they don't favor applicants due to wealth. The former has always been true on one level: they're expensive. The latter is presumably due to restrictions on various funding systems requiring them to not have any wealth favoritism.
If the claims of the suit are true, then it's presumably trying to use proxies for wealth rather than explicitly saying "give us $$$s and we'll let you in"/
This is a problem markets can fix. The only way you get into an elite school is you donate a lot of money, you were admitted for color, or you know how to play the game. None of these abilities are things businesses should value, and I'd rather take a top student from a top state school because they're competent at the right things.
It’s very rare that “be highly competent” alone is enough to optimize for (ethical) success.
People, including one’s customers, often have drivers other than competence (e.g., significance or likability). Knowing how to cater to those drivers while also being competent is a fairly common and consistent recipe for success.
I understand why you'd value it, but the problem is these people are better at delivering on self-serving, engineered OKRs than delivering value to the company. They'll look amazing on every measurable metric, but not on the metrics that really matter.
If you run a consultancy, you're right, this is exactly who you want.
Graduating from an elite college is tautologically wealth signaling, so why would the same interested students complain about that fact while at the same time perpetuate its significance?
Part of the issue with this is that wealthy people are often wealthy because they're very smart, and being smart is in part due to genetics. So it follows that smart children will disproportionately have wealthy parents, and that will lead to more children of wealthy parents in high ranking colleges. This has been proven many times, most famously in the NLSY which surveyed thousands of kids over the course of their life, and researchers found if you adjusted for IQ you could predict a child's future income well, and you could predict which children of wealthy parents were likely to build more wealth or lose it all by looking at their IQ.
Unfortunately the courts have a history of disallowing the use of IQ, viewing it as a violation of the civil rights act (see Griggs v. Duke Power Co. for more info). The colleges may be found liable of favoritism towards wealthy students, despite it most likely being the opposite.
Before you posted this, did you ask yourself what evidence might be used to counter your argument, as a way strengthen your position? If you were correct in your analysis, what evidence do you have as proof?
The NLSY is the classic example of this. It was a multi-decade study over thousands of people which looked at a variety of things as the kids aged into adults and through their lives. The wealth and IQ correlation was one of the results, and if you're interested in reading more I'd recommend The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray, who were Harvard professors who primarily followed this study and reported the results in regards to IQ, as well as the other majors studies and their results.
It's always been obvious the the wealthy are over represented at these schools and that "need blind" admissions somehow result in classes of overly wealthy mixed with just enough middle and lower income folks to blunt the plutocratic sheen a bit.
Presumably need blind admissions skew high income to begin with just because some parts of America verge on third world and illiterate without even taking other factors into account, but I also have to assume their financial aid practices are carefully designed, perhaps with full US government support (FAFSA is a hilarious thing in many respects), to further distill out an appropriately wealthy distribution of admits.
The fact that government money and aid can go to these schools that are so instrumental in the creation and sustenance of elites has always been a farcical betrayal of the democratic ideal.
Very curious how far they've gone to prevent documentation of the kinds of things plaintiffs would know doubt like to know from ever existing to begin with.
This is one of those complex topics which on HN, seesm to lead to "it's simple, do X" types of analyses, which tend to be simple, confident, and wrong.
Some facts to consider:
At Harvard, over 40% of non-minority students received special treatment for admissions (which includes factors such as being a legacy, athlete, or the 'dean's list' which was a list of high donating parents). 75% of those would not have been admitted w/o that help. I think this lawsuit is trying to pierce this veil. [1]
For those that argue "meritocracy" and that standardized testing is the answer: the SAT has a correlation of about r=0.3 to 0.5 with first year college GPA. Thus, the explained variance (r*2) is about 9% to 25%, meaning as much as 81% of college success is not statstically predicted by the SAT. [2]
> 75% of those would not have been admitted w/o that help
this not making a claim anywhere near as interesting as it pretends. Since you're using a %, what is the % difference in quality that admitting these 75% makes (assuming it's even true, considering I don't believe much from the Guardian) and how does that (what the author calls "affirmative action") compare with other affirmative actions taken to achieve a balanced class? were they otherwise 99% good enough, or only 10% good enough?
My money is on above 90% because I went to an elite school (that has no legacy) and lots of people there were extremely highly qualified, and the ones who weren't did not fall in a pattern of being wealthy or whatever, probably better explained by something like your evidence of how ineffective IQ (what SAT does correlate to) or high school grades are in predicting college GPA and how effective GPA is or isn't in predicting future contributions. I find grades have much more to do with psychological makeup, like do you rebel against authority, or knuckle under. Good grades are valuable, but don't tell the whole story of your value as a contributor, sometimes screwed up and crazy genius works better. But either way, shouldn't that be up to the school what combinations they wish to place their bets on?
unless you have especially rigorous grading (and look at the volume of comments here bitching about grading on a curve, so it's rare), it's easy to get good grades by just doing the normal amount of work, put in some time each day on each class. It's a measure of conscientiousness, not smartness, ability, etc., but yes, it's a good measure of getting a baseline amount of learning out of a course, nothing exceptional.
(people here who bitch about grading on a curve should take a course in statistics graded on a curve, then listen to their fellow students who got A's to explain how it works.)
The private "school of excellence" I attended instituted a 40% minimum on any assignment turned in with a name and date on it, and labs, tests, and quizzes - combined - made up 25% of one's final grade.
The administration contended this policy had nothing to do with the $8M athletics facility built with donor funds, nor the influx of scholarships awarded to students who all happened to join the football team that year.
I disagreed. Vocally.
When I went from a 98% student to a 24% student at the start of a new semester just by refusing to write my name on any homework, I was pulled from all activities, isolated in endless detentions, and put on a "remedial track" away from my class (like ISS). It took a few more weeks of talking with the teachers and priests and protesting, but the headmaster eventually stepped down and was replaced by one of the nuns.
Grades aren't hard to cheat if the institution is complicit, especially if what's being measured is compliance and obedience.
I was specifically trying to rebut a claim that is often made that special help for minorities is bad, because we live in a meritocracy and "let those people compete on the same metric as us".
The point here is that 75% of 40% (= 30%) of the majority/white students received special help and would not have been admitted otherwise. Furthermore, much of that special help was directed because of wealth and donation power, not due to "need".
You raise a good statistical question ("ok, it's 30% of majority but what is the % for minority").
I do not have the data for that, and in a world where average income of various ethnicities was the same, that would be a compelling point.
> For those that argue "meritocracy" and that standardized testing is the answer: the SAT ...
Maybe other standardized tests are or could be better predictors. Some countries rely exclusively on them for admission (and if I'm not wrong, also the US is some specialized fields such as law or medicine).
Seems like you are going down the path of presenting the reality, where a lot of people will ignore "wealth favoritism", cronyism, nepotism, etc... But mention affirmative action, specifically minorities of color as oppose to women of a certain persuasion (also ignored or given a pass), and things can get real hot and tribalistic, real fast.
Well sir/madam, good luck with your arguments and evidence. At the very least, as it's doubtful such biases or prejudices that protects systematic advantages and socioeconomic position will be altered, it will make for a good popcorn read.
It does not look to me the SAT study you linked to concludes what you claim it concludes.
You are saying in 81% of the cases the SAT score is useless. They are saying this:
When HSGPA (high school GPA) and SAT are combined, the correlation with FYGPA jumps to .61, an increase of .08 and a 15% boost in predictive utility over using HSGPA alone.
I was replying to another comment which suggested using only standardized testing.
It's true, when you combine SAT with GPA, it's better, but that was not the point I was rebutting.
Even so, with GPA+SAT, if r = .61 then r^^2 = .37, meaning 63% of variation in college grades are not explained.
And I believe this is first year college GPA only - "getting a good GPA in freshman year" is probably a weaker argument than "succeding in college, or afterwards"
I never heard of anyone suggesting only SAT. What I heard instead (and what's happening in real life) is universities ditching the SAT. Countless universities did that (e.g. those in the U. California system). The stated reason is equity, but it's often followed by "it's redundant anyway".
Well, it's not redundant. And this study shows that.
Now you are saying that the SAT does not explain much of the freshmen year GPA. But that could be (and it probably is) a consequence of the fact that colleges have different standards. The SAT could have 100% prediction power, like the Oracle of Delphi, if the colleges have different standards the correlation between SAT and GPA will be low.
A second effect is at play here, the binning effect. If you have two variables X and Y that are highly correlated (let's say rho = 99%),and then you split the observations in bins based on X, then the correlation of X and Y for each can be very low. They could be arbitrarily close to zero. Just give it a try.
Finally, prediction power beyond the first year. Why would colleges need that? They need quantitative metrics to determine who would perform well once they come in. After that, it's their duty to educate and nurture those students. If they can't do that, and the final outcome is some form of lottery ticket, that's on them, not on the SAT.
"I never heard of anyone suggesting only SAT. " There are many comment in this thread suggesting exactly that (or suggesting a standardized test "better" than the SAT")
You point out that many Univ's have stopped using the SAT.
Some universities argue that they need the SAT to find those "diamonds in the rough" [1] (genius students who get crappy GPAs). I don't disagree with this idea.
As I understand it, most "elite" universities give special consideration to the children of parents who make large donations, in order to encourage such donations.
Is this not well known?
I have heard a couple of arguments in favor of the practice:
1) It brings more money into the university (most important reason for the university)
2) It enables the university to admit and educate a larger number of students than it could otherwise afford to (potentially pro-social reason)
They are private universities, why does it matter in the first place?
Should Catholic seminaries be forced to admit islamic students? Jeff Bezos has a $150 million house in Los Angeles, should he be forced to allow the homeless to live there?
There are a lot of other universities.
But if we are going to be strict about it, then it should be strict. We have to look at the exact makeup of every single group of people in the USA and make everything is exact. So that means Jewish students should make up only 2% of elite schools, Catholics should make up 22% of the student body, 1.1% should be muslims, 14% of students must be black, hispanics must be 18.7%, 58% must be white, 7.2% of students Asian and of course must divide it more and more. We have to figure out how many left handed students must be allowed to be in elite universities, how many with crooked vs straight teeth. This is all wonderful stuff.
Of course at universities, 50% should be men and 50% should be women. Right now, 60% of students are women and 40% are men, universities must stop admitting so many women, that is very clear. Universities should only allow 50/50.
At the premier public university of UC Berkeley, 36% are Asian and so that must be adjusted downwards to 7.2%. 23.8% of Cal Berkeley students are white, so of course, the white student population must be increased to 58%. A lot less Asians should be admitted.
At UCLA, 58.6% are women, so that has to come down so it is 50%. 28% of the student body are Asian, so that has to come down to 7.2%. White are 26.3% so that has to be adjusted up to 58%. Hispanics are 22.6%, that has to come down to 18.7%.
Of course, this must happen at every single university.
I am starting to see how this game should be played now.
> They are private universities, why does it matter in the first place?
It's not because something is private that suddenly no regulations apply. Regarding universities, I don't think the issue is that some category is over-represented, but the fairness of the admission process. That being said, with affirmative action, the admission process is already biased and isn't on academical merit alone.
>It's not because something is private that suddenly no regulations apply.
So you're saying that Catholic seminaries are required to admit muslims that want to become imams, and therefore the Catholic seminaries will be required to start a islamic department to train muslims to become imams? (rhetorical question).
So as far as the fairness of the admission process goes, all applicants should apply with no name, race, creed, or any type of way to identify who and where someone comes from? Do away with essays as they are super easy way to identify the background of an applicant? Pure test scores only?
I totally disagree with your saying that the issue isn't with some categories are over-represented. That's just not the case at all.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadI can think of a few notable examples from arguably the highest ranked university, Oxford.
> Postgraduate students at Magdalen College have voted to remove a portrait of the monarch based on a photograph by Dorothy Wilding, taken in 1952, at the time she was crowned.
> The portrait, purchased in 2013 by students to decorate the Middle Common Room (MCR), the room that houses them, has been removed because it was an unwelcoming symbol of the UK's "recent colonial history".
Something about slavery, idk
> An Oxford University college has decided to keep its statue of a Barbados-born slave owner.
> All Souls College has dropped the name Christopher Codrington from its library
The concept of audible clapping
> Representatives from the Student Union (SU) passed a motion last week to replace clapping with “jazz hands” in hopes that this will make events “more inclusive” and “accessible” for those with the mental health condition.
> This comes after the University of Manchester made international headlines for passing a similar motion in September 2018.
In general it seems we import a lot of cultural nonsense from other Anglo countries even if its not quite relevant.
https://archive.fo/XVGA8
Granted, there are certainly tankie students in US colleges - but they don't usually run official Twitter accounts of student societies endorsed by the college. It reminded me more of the kind of stuff Orwell was writing about the UK intelligentsia in 1945:
"The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice. One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
So I think there's plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the Atlantic. ~
Let's not kid ourselfs that is not a wild conspiracy or some socialist agenda. Ending corruption is in everybodies interest, except you are planing to yourself profit from that system by making strategic donations in your offsprings interest.
Alternatively, if you subscribe to your police / sheriff department FB or Twitter feed or whatever they have, they will often post news about training their staff at such-and-such academy or training center. Looking those places up and reading about what they teach, exactly, can be very illuminating - "killology", for example.
And then there's the Fraternal Order of Police...
I know several people who have succeeded in tech in staff+/leadership roles without any college degree at all!
In law, and medicine, and academia in general? Sure, your pedigree matters. But in tech, and in many engineering fields, a state school degree is all you need.
Just look at the numbers. If it was so easy, again, everyone would do it. It's not.
I saw this with my own school. I have a hard time finding any graduates from my program who aren't gainfully employed right now.
CS degrees aren't like business degrees. It's much harder. Hence, many don't do it, despite the huge financial advantages of doing it.
Edit: I stand corrected, and I rescind my assertion.
https://www.openthebooks.com/assets/1/7/Oversight_IvyLeagueI...
All the others take federal money in some way, shape, or form.
I drive on federally funded roads, should they get recording devices to see and hear my every move?
Expect colleges to fight this much, much harder than they ever did for anything related to affirmative action, because this is actually hitting them where it hurts.
More money gets you a voice in hiring committees where you can set the tone of the department and shape political discourse. The Koch brothers (those people again) did that very successfully with George Mason University when they transformed what was a commuter college into a megaphone for libertarian ideas.
There is also a flip side to this coin, which is why universities usually call this the “development” office.
If you are going to give money away, you are very likely to give it to an organization to which you have some sort of affinity to. Universities are actively trying to cultivate that affinity so they can capture some or all of your charitable spending. And they really, really don’t want any donor to know how much they’ve been manipulated. Many people really believe that their child earned their admission letter based on merit.
A lesson that generalizes well. Remember Occupy Wall Street, Piketty's tome, the Bernie primaries? It all feels like distant history now.
Occupy Wall Street had participants that counted at most 30,000 cumulatively across demonstrations in NY and surrounding areas. Impressive number? Not in my opinion.
Admittedly, I have no idea what the hell 'Piketty's tome' is, so I won't talk about it, seems like its related to a few books that sold 1.5m copies, pretty successful, that's it from me for now though.
Bernie in 2016 received ~43% of the vote in democratic primaries, in 2020 he slipped down to ~26%, neither times was he close. Hillary received ~55% in 2016, Joe received ~51% in 2020. Opinion polls consistently put Hillary far above Bernie throughout the entire election season. In 2020, Joe also had the highest approval rating amongst candidates in DNC, only dropping for a few weeks where admittedly Bernie had higher approval, but then dropped it when it really mattered.
So you'll have to point to me where exactly these people are popular, maybe within their own world? Maybe by spending? That only works for Bernie, not for Occupy Wall Street which was a very minor event by all measures. Can't speak to Picketty, so I will leave that undecided on my end, and let you define it's success.
Note, I am far from a Democrat or a Socialist, in fact I'm Republican through and through.
And Bernie is a great example because identity politics was specifically used against him; his supporters were derided as mostly white male "Bernie Bros".
Sounds like exactly what GP was talking about: steering conversations to race and sex to avoid talking about economic inequality.
And the abiding irony of that was that most of the people who did that supported Elizabeth Warren, who had vanishingly little support from actual minorities. She finished behind Tom Steyer in South Carolina and behind Mayor Pete in Nevada (states where the democratic base is heavily black and hispanic, respectively).
Even the New York Times acknowledged that Warren's campaign was a "demographic cul-de-sac" dominated by "college-educated white people." And those people had the gall to paint Bernie--who has invested enormous time and energy in reaching out to Hispanics and did well among that group--as racist.
I would argue, however, that he faced tremendous opposition from the wealthy, and that translated into most corporate media either attacking him or ignoring him, so his supporters could only be heard on social media.
Corporate opposition is a just-so story. Until his campaign fell apart, Sanders stomped Biden in earned media coverage.
What isn't popular among voters, by contrast, is the woke managerialism lane Warren has come to represent. That's significant both because it points to how the party should recalibrate its message, and also because of its implications for the party's management structure (where the woke managerialists have outsize power). I suspect Democrats' reshuffling of the primaries will significantly ameliorate both problems.
I'm not a Warren fan either. I'm the weirdo in this conversation who was actually rooting for Biden.
That being said he was probably the only person who could’ve stopped the union workers in Ohio from flipping to Trump.
> And Bernie is a great example because identity politics was specifically used against him; his supporters were derided as mostly white male "Bernie Bros".
Really? I thought "Bernie Bros" were deemed the 'working class' as proclaimed by Bernie style 'Socialists' that model their economic ideals based on a fictional EU. This seems like it's rewriting history.
> Sounds like exactly what GP was talking about: steering conversations to race and sex to avoid talking about economic inequality.
Sure, which is what you did, on your own, through your own comment, I talked about popularity, you're in some weird area where you are vaguely on the same topic as I am but pretending like it is towards the point.
Bernie had no shot. Both times. If he runs again in 2024, which will be hilarious if he does, it will simply be to raise money for the DNC, just like he did the last 2 times. No refunds. Look at that, did not mention a single demographic other than 'he' in these short 2 sentences, maybe you're onto something with 'Bernie Bros'.
"Robinson Meyer, a writer for The Atlantic, coined the term Bernie bro in an October 17, 2015 article to describe young, white, progressive men who, in his view, support unrealistic progressive policies"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Bro
And if you think this is all off topic, you must have missed this quote from the root of this thread:
> U.S. colleges have been carefully steering conversations about admissions in the direction of racial quotas, to avoid talking about how by far the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements.
IOW, steering conversations to race to avoid talking about class and economic inequality.
Piketty is an economist who wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which is a book on economics and wealth inequality (essentially arguing that the rich are inevitably going to get richer absent government intervention).
I mean, I do think that students getting in because daddy gives a couple million isn't the end of the world.
The college I went to 20 years ago went away from need-blind admissions, which basically meant if you can pay you get some preference. Now THAT was bad, because it affected the general student population. If instead you have a reserved number of "bribe" students and that means pure-merit admissions can be done with the rest of the students, well, ok.
I love how admissions of athletes to play sports gets a total pass. Probably because it putatively is a good means for minorities to get into schools, even if they are separated off into purely sports training tracks and joke academics.
The real issue is the MBAs running the colleges as a profit industry. Except there's no profits, so they pay... themselves.
And sadly, even if they succeed on this track into the world of professional sports, the joke academics and lack of financial training (if you had a financial education you would never play college sports anyway...) mean that they're set up to go broke and fail in life as soon as the injuries add up or their athletic ability is no longer exceptional to their peer group.
Let’s not pretend all those legacies are showing up to class and working hard.
From my personal experiences, I suspect the restriction of financial aid based on arbitrary cutoffs affects more people. I know several people who got into ivys, but didn't go because they didn't qualify for financial aid and chose not to take on large amounts of debt, coming from frugal lower/middle class families.
(As an aside: as an advisor of PhD students in computer science, I sometimes have to train students out of these habits. Research doesn’t happen if you’re used to getting the shallow answer more quickly, or if you’re afraid to be wrong.)
You seem to be coming from the perspective that testing must be the best metric, and then trying to develop a methodology based on that assumption. Purely as a thought exercise: it might be helpful to start from the assumption that testing isn’t an option, and think about what you might do instead.
At that time, the SAT was good at predicting the likely performance of a prospective college student … for one term. That’s it. I got an excellent score on my SAT (not a perfect score, but I thought that it was a bullshit measure — which, like all standardized testing, it is — so I didn’t care). I did well in my first term, and then not so well after that (I ended up doing fine in the end, but it took longer to get through a degree program because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up; I think that Americans, by and large, put too much focus on going to university too early and we would be better served by an extra year of high school and/or a gap year).
One other thing I remember from that time period is that a better predictor of overall success in school was NOBITH, the Number Of Bathrooms In The House. That is, socioeconomic indicators were a better predictor than anything else, including nonsense standardized tests like the SAT. And given that socioeconomic indicators are a better indicator, that is a strong indication that there’s seriously wasted potential at all levels of eduction because we mistakenly equate family socioeconomics with success in general.
They would then just keep admitting people until they hit 5000 offers.
Then they got accused of racism because that process ended up overweighting Whites and Asians compared to the applicant pool for all the top schools.
There is/was a lot of debate on why Whites and Asians did better, but when you dug in it turned out they tended to almost all be upper-middle class or wealthy. So basically it was wealth and systemic racism, masked by "standardized testing".
Also it should be noted that wealthy people had a better chance at a higher weighted GPA because their schools offered more AP courses.
Is admitting the most capable students unfair? It is inherently discriminatory based on their knowledge and ability, which seems is what people want, but it also means that having more resources to be better equipped aka better nurture, which tends to positively influence individual's prospects, is suddenly something many are not okay with?
Obviously, the SAT tests are flawed one way or another. But then again, they don't care for students' superficial characteristics.
If not that, then implied statement is very reminiscent to slogans used in USSR or during cultural revolution in China.
Are they actually the most capable students, or did they just have a better chance of getting higher scores on the arbitrary metrics chosen? And if so, why did they have a higher chance?
There is a difference between better nurture and lack of opportunity. It's true, we shouldn't be correcting for lack of opportunity at the college admissions level, we should be doing it at the elementary level and younger.
But it's a lot easier to correct it at the college admissions level, which is a good choke point in one's life path, so for now, that is where the focus is.
Further, why should colleges try to correct for lack of opportunity? Their job is to educate people, and not everyone is apt for higher education. Admitting a student with poor mathematical abilities into a rigorous engineering program is just setting that student up for failure, not recompensing him for opportunities lost or squandered earlier.
Public schools should do it because they are part of the education system that needs correction.
Private schools arguably are still part of the public education system since they all get Federal dollars, and thus the same argument applies.
If they're getting tax dollars, that makes them a public good, and therefore they should be doing things that help all people, not just some people.
A student who goes to a poor school who offers zero AP classes will always achieve lower weighted GPAs than students who go to wealthy schools that offer many AP classes. No amount of individual achievement will overcome that mathematical disadvatnage.
Racism comes into when, because of racism, it just so happens that schools who are well funded and can give that advantage are overwhelmingly white, and schools who are are poorly funded and cannot give that advantage are overwhelmingly non-white.
Suggesting that a student who is "placed above his or her station" into an elite program is setup for failure is a favorite of a few SCOTUS Justices, but in fact is not supported by evidence. Graduation and other metrics of success are not strongly correlated to past attainment, primarily because most programs have already had to deal with achievement inequities, and the most successful programs already have mechanisms to even out unequal prior achievement. Virtually all programs that have elite programs already have a substantial apparatus dedicated to filling achievement gaps between incoming students.
The larger question of "what is the purpose of college" and "is it to educate people" is bigger than this thread, but shouldn't be overlooked. For schools that are publicly funded in whole or part, there should be a larger mission than sending young adults through an educational meat grinder. The public mission of public universities should absolutely have a social justice component.
There is absolutely no doubt that we could design an education system which, at an early age, divides and tracks students towards a successful and high level of attainment. By ruthlessly focusing resources on those children with the best chances of success, and minimizing resources expended on those with lower changes of success, the system could produce many multiples of positive outcomes than we do now, but at the cost of many more left with almost no attainment. Our present distribution of resources, in the US, is haphazardly assembled and produces a balance of outcomes, but is by no means optimized for any particular set of outcomes.
However, the downside to "solving" this is significantly worse. By giving a headstart to students based on their superficial or socioeconomical characteristics creates perverse incentives in the system and disconnects it from a selection process.
Usually, countries that are not US solve this by providing free tutorships or lectures to aspiring students, scholarships and a fixed quota of free placements in the admission for top performing students (each country may have their own flavour of the policy, but the main thing they !fortunately! did not use to be based on race or gender).
It is usually much better, in my personal opinion, to provide the "help" to those who seek it rather than trying to equalize for outcome. Poor upbringing can and usually does damage and incapacitates individuals to an extent. But any movement among the lines of "not having issues or being better prepared means you have to do more work" explicitly discourages the optimal behaviour, incentivizing victim-hood and demoralizes individuals which did use the opportunities available to them or managed to create ones.
Again, and I cannot stress this enough, communism is bad.
> Again, and I cannot stress this enough, communism is bad.
Again I agree with you. But I'm not sure how that's relevant. Changing the way we do college admissions isn't communism.
In fact, admitting students purely based on test scores is something that happens in communist countries.
They are the most capable. You call them abitrary, without stating what makes them arbitrary. Until you prove they're arbitrary, your opinion isn't worth addressing.
Standardized testing isn’t perfectly meritocratic, but everything else is worse.
As a side note, I haven’t found any more detailed breakdown of the personality scoring results. Asia is a very diverse place and Asian ethnic groups in the US range from the very richest to some of the poorest.
For example, Harvard could simply auction off their seats. That’s transparent at least, if not exactly fair.
Or maybe alternative is truly random or negative wealth scoring. That is only the poorest students get entry and everyone else will have to figure out something else.
Grades and standardized test scores might be one of the least interesting and almost definitely one of the less effective ways to classify the “most capable” students.
If I’m optimizing for students who do cool stuff, force marching them into relatively banal optimization tasks is counterproductive.
With that said, I think modern education system can no longer scale and has outlived its usefulness. The future is with LLM-driven tutors which can somewhat alleviate the scaling issues inherent to "apprenticeship". Personally, as an ADHD individual it was always drastically easier to study under a person who gives you dedicated attention that for any of my peers. By a wide margin. And yet, studying for local SAT equivalent was an insurmountable task involving acquiring a lot of knowledge and skills that were useless outside of passing the test.
It would be more constructive to improve teacher education, wages, and standards to create a more productive and better resourced education system.
You could look to countries such as Finland et al for a model rather than drawing upon satirical dystopian ankle deep in thought Harrison Bergeron scenarios.
My understanding is that Brown basically does that. This would sort of back that up:
https://collegeshortcuts.com/blog/brown-acceptance-rate
It would also put a ton of pressure on high school students to get perfect scores, creating a ton more stress than they already have. And at the expense of much more valuable things they could be doing with their time.
The current system has issues, but there are worse ways to do things.
The number of high school or undergrads who wrote groundbreaking biology papers is vanishingly small, but you do raise a good point. There’s a chicken and egg problem. Because schools aren’t just weighting test scores (because the score is flawed) there is incentive to work on other, more subjective things.
That’s tricky. In a massive country with many incredible students, it seems to me that it’s going to be possible for the top .1% of students to do as well as is possible on any reasonable exam.
Do you disagree?
If wealth is the ultimate playground for everything (capitalism?), then obviously the elite institutions are playing the right game.
There might be natural reasons for that but there were also clearly some perverse effects: because those exams became effectively competitive exams (fixed number of seats available), they require intense preparation in preparatory schools which became the educational equivalent of a 2-3y navy seal bootcamp (it's not enough to have good grades, you need the best grades). Teachers in poor area high schools were often unfamiliar and intimidated by this system (they didn't go through it themselves), and were actively discouraging good students from taking that path. Students not having educated parents who knew the system were not pushed to work really hard to get into, and survive that system either. And you ended up with 80%-90% of the kids in those colleges coming from families from similar colleges. Money wouldn't be a major factor, the top colleges and preparatory schools are free.
Now the natural ratio shouldn't be 3-5% (elite college educated parent as % of general population), probably around 50-60%, certainly not 80-90%.
For the past 15y, France has opted to break the thermometer instead, ie to bypass those exams for the majority of the recruitment, and to select students on file which grants them full latitude for subjectivity. I suspect they also nationalised the selection process of those preparatory schools (not super familiar with the latest developments). I think the main consequence is that those elite colleges will quickly lose their prestige, and it might actually be the unstated intention, i.e. converge to a german like education system where the name and prestige of the university matters little vs the profile of the student.
It might be a good thing or perhaps it will just ruin the french educational system, it's hard to tell.
And for anyone who thinks it's unfair: not anymore so than the parent lottery. And I think institutional acknowledgment of the role pure dumb luck plays in our lives would go a long way towards dispelling our inclination to actively punish people for acts of the cosmos and/or dysfunctional policy.
This reminded me of something back when I was in high school in my Latin American country. There used to be this locally known international university-application-consultant and one of the things he mentioned for the "satisfaction guaranteed" of his services was being familiar on which Universities needed to increase their Latin American demographics and how to use that in the applicant's favor to increase the chances of a successful college and scholarship application. This was mostly targeted to students at bilingual or international schools whose families were already wealthier than average.
> shared the same life experiences regardless of their race
Where I grew up bilingual/international school students live in an isolated bubble separate from the rest of students. So they grow up with the study plans, standardized tests, music, tv shows and pop culture from their international school's country.
So probably that's why their life experience might have been more similar to those in the U.S. This is only a small fraction of the students though.
For example a high school student from American School of my country might know about the SAT test prep, Ivy applications, college application essay writing, and be familiar with US issues. All of those which would be mostly unknown by students outside that circle. Making others less likely to successfully apply.
It's possible that race simply has more charge than class does, regardless of the axiomatic arguments people have for why it should be the other way around.
Clearly there is a large constituency for class-oriented progressivism. Sanders wouldn't have been able to win California, Nevada, and Colorado, and hold his own in Texas, otherwise. What Warren proves is that adding identity politics to the mix is a losing proposition, even in the Democratic Party.
Instead they will be forced to go to another private school which will receive their endowments, and soon grow to the point they can compete with elite schools. Harvard, et all will still be good schools but not the "best" schools that people die to get into.
https://www.naicu.edu/docLib/20150803_Antitrust_legislation....
- POC
- child of alum
- athlete
- famous person or child of famous person
The list goes on.
and who are also completely lacking empathy for the financially challenged at best, disregard and look down upon the less privileged at worst. Both may lead to social isolation of persons with different socioeconomic background attending said schools.
If you even want to get into such games, having the money isn't enough. You need the aura that it's small stakes to you. Multiple cash game hustlers have written about this phenomenon.
source?
source please
My experience:
- people from less privileged background didn't need empathy. By being there, they were bound to have a successful career
- students tend to get along better with people from similar background/interest but there were enough diversity so that nobody felt they didn't belong, and nobody was looked down.
That being said, we don't have as much inequalities as in the US and also no quota/positive discrimination. Everybody who was there passed the same selective anonymous exams, which I think is very important. I can see why US students who benefited from favorable admissions criteria are looked down or suffer from imposter syndrome.
> Everybody who was there passed the same selective anonymous exams
My comment was targeted to the US university system where getting born in the “right”family is all you need to have access to elite education.
> It’s a lazy, unintelligent critique
I think this is what a subset of people belonging to lower socioeconomic classes tell themselves, and sometimes have heard it from their “superiors”, to better cope with their financial struggle. The poor people are just lazy is the motto of the privileged and is also a safe assumption to make for a rich person to have.
What percentage of millionaires inherited their wealth? Go Google it. Now tell me if it’s ok to judge any group of people based on that percentage.
It may be incomplete but your next sentence about inheritance is actually what's poor judgement on your part.
I didn't mention direct inheritance in my previous comment, however it's really hard to make any distinction between this and the fact that being born in the 'right' family means access to professional/educational opportunities due to specific connections almost never easily attainable by the ordinary mortals. And yes, this often means, especially in professional settings, getting away with doing the bare minimum and staying on the job just because the boss was in high school with your shipowner dad.
> What percentage of millionaires inherited their wealth?
This is a really problematic way to address the effect of inheritance has on one's wealth since such percentages are relied on self-reports, which means that effectively all will identify as self-made. I find it entertaining, but also telling about the brainwashing the financially desperate have suffered, people like Elon Musk being cited as self-made when they always happen to come from financially privileged families.
Not hating, just observing.
In the end it’s the non wealthy students that make or break a schools reputation which is why schools give out scholarships etc. It’s a pure transaction your future achievements aid us and our reputation and resources aid you.
Schools also specialize so Harvard doesn’t have nearly the reputation in say animation as CalArts etc.
Part of it is logistics: wealthy had money for weekend ski trips, cars, didn’t have to work student jobs so had more free time.
Maybe it’s changed? I was there over a decade ago.
I think they'll do it again. If this movement finds legs and makes itself hard to ignore, then the corporate media will once again use their editorial powers to shift the conversation away from the class narrative, probably again in the direction of divisive race politics.
Sadly, the weak left in the US falls for it every time, shrinking at each step, becoming incapable of providing a vision for a better future for all—because they all start fighting over who’s doing the identity politics thing better. The right uselessly plays into the new narrative by fighting over how much they should have to even care about the new identity politics, arguing for a return to the time before the identity politics became the dominant theme.
With both sides playing a pointless game, the damage is done—the fight that united people rarely returns with the same force it had before (as people exhaust themselves over divisive identity politics), and neoliberal dominance secures another decade or so of relative ease and impunity.
I was naive and initially shocked by "the list" when I was told about it. A list of applicants who were the children of faculty, staff, very large benefactors, and politicians. They could NOT be denied by any admissions councilor without a very serious reason (eg. convicted of a violent crime).
I raised an eyebrow.
Then I discovered that that list accounted for a full 25% of EVERY incoming class. Literally hundreds of students per year.
I raised the other eyebrow.
Then I realized that the constant and extreme push for diversity recruiting was to obfuscate the obvious nepotism and secrecy in admissions. The remaining part of the incoming class had to vastly overachieve diversity metrics so anyone questioning admissions or seeking transparency could be easily demonized for being <insert insult>.
They will never ever EVER allow transparency in admissions.
This is open knowledge. From the WSJ, https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-get-into-the-ivy-league-extr...:
```
Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.
At Harvard, low-income students with top academic scores had an admit rate of 24% compared to 15% for all other applicants, according to a 2013 study by the school. Harvard has said it believes enrolling a diverse student body is important because the school wants students to learn to work with people from different backgrounds.
“The middle class tends to get a little bit neglected,” said Hafeez Lakhani, a private college counselor in New York who charges $1,200 an hour. “Twenty years ago, Ms. Younger would have had a good shot at an Ivy League school.”
```
Using just "white" is extremely misleading. Harvard undergraduates are already only 40% white [1], but 10% are Jewish [2] (despite being only 2% of the US population). Meaning non-Jewish whites, which are 56% of the US, are only 30% of Harvard undergraduates. For graduate students it's even more ridiculous - 53% Jewish, 28% non-Jewish white.
"White privilege" in action.
[1] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/s...
[2] https://www.hillel.org/college/harvard-university/
Hold up, is this saying that literally over half of the graduate students are Jewish?? Am I reading this right?
Perhaps we should ask for the diversity statistics to count Jewish numbers separately so we could have official numbers, but I suspect that might encounter some resistance :)
*For 2015, the Jerusalem Post actually estimates Jews at 25% of undergraduates, but that may be relying on some since-corrected overestimation by Hillel. See https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co... and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat...
What does this mean? They didn't qualify for student aid, they qualifed and were denied, or they went to a school, saw they could have paid less and were upset?
Without some kind of intervention that prevents employers using college degrees for employment decisions we’re gonna be here a while.
Not going to one of the "elite" schools is, though, and it's not like financial aid disappeared at all the state schools.
The reputational difference between the state schools and the ivy league has been narrowing a lot in recent years in response to numerous scandals like this and a lot of improvement from the state schools. Is there any reason for the government to step in here, rather than just letting the ivy league continue to destroy its reputation?
And having all these schools’ names be dragged through the mud during the court proceedings will further your goal.
The elite schools are considered "elite" not because they offer a better education, but because they ensure that your classmates will be valuable network contacts after you graduate.
From the perspective of the school, admitting people who are already wealthy/successful is preferable to admitting people who may become successful in the future. The school's status depends on having a disproportionately large population from the former group.
They act this way because the business world works similarly: you are more valuable if you are already on a first-name basis with high-level executives and politicals, because you can listen to the wind and bring your contacts in on the businesses that you are involved in.
All of that is a long-winded rephrasing of the old truism: it's not about what you know, but who you know.
This is how organizations die, political, corporate, non-profit, or any other type. People who are good at knowing other people frequently aren’t the best person for the job, and selecting for newcomers who are good at knowing other people over work leads to aristocrats and manipulative sociopaths taking over, and then you have GE, a company that lost its ability to innovate, could only copy hot trends popular among Wall Street poorly, moved into finance and oil despite having no expertise in these fields to the tune of billion dollar losses, and is now a mess in the process of being broken up and dissolved.
On a much greater scale, Putin’s Russia works a lot like this, which has led it to become an incompetent brutal dictatorship that terrorizes its citizens and also can’t even take over Ukraine, one of the poorest country in Europe and its direct neighbor, because everyone who was competent got pushed out or killed.
Anyway the claim in the lawsuit about lost money is really just theoretical - most of the top schools collaborate in developing methods to determine how much aid a student should receive. The lawsuit is claiming that if the top schools could not "collude" on aid, students would have gotten more of it.
However I think that is a massive assumption that is not going to play out the way they would like. These schools reject 100s of qualified people every year that would gladly take a spot with current aid packages. There might be an occasional superstar that schools do compete over, but your average small town middle class 1600 SAT kid is super fucking replaceable.
Hell I could see aid being lower if schools didn't "collude", because being part of this need blind consortium is good PR. The lesser schools that give lesser aid are the ones that supposedly don't collude.
Legally it will be an interesting case though - the reason these schools are allowed to work together on aid package formulas is because they practice need blind admissions, which really only the top unis do. The lawsuit argues that admissions is not actually need blind, because of preferential admission for wealthy donors and some other admissions dynamics that are more common and inadvertently factor in wealth.
That makes this discovery highly relevant to the case, and while I think need blind status will be ultimately upheld, I'm sure the schools don't want the info getting out.
Interestingly, the initial lawsuit is based purely on public info and a handful of salty (unclear why) students. There isn't private info about people's aid packages or anything like that supporting it as far as I can find. I suspect the people suing realized they had an argument the schools weren't actually need blind, and that is what they actually wanted to challenge, so they dug up an argument about supposed low ball aid packages because the need blind schools form an aid consortium.
A lot of the articles about the lawsuit have left out critical details about what is actually being claimed, the claims make no sense until you realize this is actually about challenging need blind status. Here is an article that does touch on the key issues: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/us/financial-aid-lawsuit-...
> The defense lawyers also called the demand for admissions and development records "intrusive and burdensome."
Prediction: the schools lose, and have to turn over the data.
Maybe if their argument was on privacy of the donors, they'd have a chance. Saying "it's intrusive and burdensome" to ask us for this is utter BS that any judge should see through.
It also works both ways. The defendant can dump all sorts of papers on the plaintiff and say, “be careful what you ask for, good luck wading through this!”
If they dumped all the donors over $50,000 for the last 10 years, even on paper, I can't believe it would be that much to go through.
What if such a data set doesn’t exist? What if it’s all in the email and word docs for these collegiate development and admissions departments over a decade? How do you tell it apart?
I don't even disagree with this, but I'm not sympathetic towards the schools, either.
If the claims of the suit are true, then it's presumably trying to use proxies for wealth rather than explicitly saying "give us $$$s and we'll let you in"/
As a business owner, I value this trait highly.
It’s very rare that “be highly competent” alone is enough to optimize for (ethical) success.
People, including one’s customers, often have drivers other than competence (e.g., significance or likability). Knowing how to cater to those drivers while also being competent is a fairly common and consistent recipe for success.
If you run a consultancy, you're right, this is exactly who you want.
Unfortunately the courts have a history of disallowing the use of IQ, viewing it as a violation of the civil rights act (see Griggs v. Duke Power Co. for more info). The colleges may be found liable of favoritism towards wealthy students, despite it most likely being the opposite.
Lastly here's the article if you're also paywalled https://archive.is/PX63H
Presumably need blind admissions skew high income to begin with just because some parts of America verge on third world and illiterate without even taking other factors into account, but I also have to assume their financial aid practices are carefully designed, perhaps with full US government support (FAFSA is a hilarious thing in many respects), to further distill out an appropriately wealthy distribution of admits.
The fact that government money and aid can go to these schools that are so instrumental in the creation and sustenance of elites has always been a farcical betrayal of the democratic ideal.
Very curious how far they've gone to prevent documentation of the kinds of things plaintiffs would know doubt like to know from ever existing to begin with.
Some facts to consider:
At Harvard, over 40% of non-minority students received special treatment for admissions (which includes factors such as being a legacy, athlete, or the 'dean's list' which was a list of high donating parents). 75% of those would not have been admitted w/o that help. I think this lawsuit is trying to pierce this veil. [1]
For those that argue "meritocracy" and that standardized testing is the answer: the SAT has a correlation of about r=0.3 to 0.5 with first year college GPA. Thus, the explained variance (r*2) is about 9% to 25%, meaning as much as 81% of college success is not statstically predicted by the SAT. [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/17/harvar...
[2] https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/national-sat-val...
this not making a claim anywhere near as interesting as it pretends. Since you're using a %, what is the % difference in quality that admitting these 75% makes (assuming it's even true, considering I don't believe much from the Guardian) and how does that (what the author calls "affirmative action") compare with other affirmative actions taken to achieve a balanced class? were they otherwise 99% good enough, or only 10% good enough?
My money is on above 90% because I went to an elite school (that has no legacy) and lots of people there were extremely highly qualified, and the ones who weren't did not fall in a pattern of being wealthy or whatever, probably better explained by something like your evidence of how ineffective IQ (what SAT does correlate to) or high school grades are in predicting college GPA and how effective GPA is or isn't in predicting future contributions. I find grades have much more to do with psychological makeup, like do you rebel against authority, or knuckle under. Good grades are valuable, but don't tell the whole story of your value as a contributor, sometimes screwed up and crazy genius works better. But either way, shouldn't that be up to the school what combinations they wish to place their bets on?
(people here who bitch about grading on a curve should take a course in statistics graded on a curve, then listen to their fellow students who got A's to explain how it works.)
The administration contended this policy had nothing to do with the $8M athletics facility built with donor funds, nor the influx of scholarships awarded to students who all happened to join the football team that year.
I disagreed. Vocally.
When I went from a 98% student to a 24% student at the start of a new semester just by refusing to write my name on any homework, I was pulled from all activities, isolated in endless detentions, and put on a "remedial track" away from my class (like ISS). It took a few more weeks of talking with the teachers and priests and protesting, but the headmaster eventually stepped down and was replaced by one of the nuns.
Grades aren't hard to cheat if the institution is complicit, especially if what's being measured is compliance and obedience.
The point here is that 75% of 40% (= 30%) of the majority/white students received special help and would not have been admitted otherwise. Furthermore, much of that special help was directed because of wealth and donation power, not due to "need".
You raise a good statistical question ("ok, it's 30% of majority but what is the % for minority").
I do not have the data for that, and in a world where average income of various ethnicities was the same, that would be a compelling point.
Maybe other standardized tests are or could be better predictors. Some countries rely exclusively on them for admission (and if I'm not wrong, also the US is some specialized fields such as law or medicine).
Well sir/madam, good luck with your arguments and evidence. At the very least, as it's doubtful such biases or prejudices that protects systematic advantages and socioeconomic position will be altered, it will make for a good popcorn read.
You are saying in 81% of the cases the SAT score is useless. They are saying this:
It's true, when you combine SAT with GPA, it's better, but that was not the point I was rebutting.
Even so, with GPA+SAT, if r = .61 then r^^2 = .37, meaning 63% of variation in college grades are not explained.
And I believe this is first year college GPA only - "getting a good GPA in freshman year" is probably a weaker argument than "succeding in college, or afterwards"
Well, it's not redundant. And this study shows that.
Now you are saying that the SAT does not explain much of the freshmen year GPA. But that could be (and it probably is) a consequence of the fact that colleges have different standards. The SAT could have 100% prediction power, like the Oracle of Delphi, if the colleges have different standards the correlation between SAT and GPA will be low.
A second effect is at play here, the binning effect. If you have two variables X and Y that are highly correlated (let's say rho = 99%),and then you split the observations in bins based on X, then the correlation of X and Y for each can be very low. They could be arbitrarily close to zero. Just give it a try.
Finally, prediction power beyond the first year. Why would colleges need that? They need quantitative metrics to determine who would perform well once they come in. After that, it's their duty to educate and nurture those students. If they can't do that, and the final outcome is some form of lottery ticket, that's on them, not on the SAT.
You point out that many Univ's have stopped using the SAT.
Some universities argue that they need the SAT to find those "diamonds in the rough" [1] (genius students who get crappy GPAs). I don't disagree with this idea.
As I said, it's complicated.
[1] https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
Is this not well known?
I have heard a couple of arguments in favor of the practice:
1) It brings more money into the university (most important reason for the university)
2) It enables the university to admit and educate a larger number of students than it could otherwise afford to (potentially pro-social reason)
Should Catholic seminaries be forced to admit islamic students? Jeff Bezos has a $150 million house in Los Angeles, should he be forced to allow the homeless to live there?
There are a lot of other universities.
But if we are going to be strict about it, then it should be strict. We have to look at the exact makeup of every single group of people in the USA and make everything is exact. So that means Jewish students should make up only 2% of elite schools, Catholics should make up 22% of the student body, 1.1% should be muslims, 14% of students must be black, hispanics must be 18.7%, 58% must be white, 7.2% of students Asian and of course must divide it more and more. We have to figure out how many left handed students must be allowed to be in elite universities, how many with crooked vs straight teeth. This is all wonderful stuff.
Of course at universities, 50% should be men and 50% should be women. Right now, 60% of students are women and 40% are men, universities must stop admitting so many women, that is very clear. Universities should only allow 50/50.
At the premier public university of UC Berkeley, 36% are Asian and so that must be adjusted downwards to 7.2%. 23.8% of Cal Berkeley students are white, so of course, the white student population must be increased to 58%. A lot less Asians should be admitted.
At UCLA, 58.6% are women, so that has to come down so it is 50%. 28% of the student body are Asian, so that has to come down to 7.2%. White are 26.3% so that has to be adjusted up to 58%. Hispanics are 22.6%, that has to come down to 18.7%.
Of course, this must happen at every single university.
I am starting to see how this game should be played now.
It's not because something is private that suddenly no regulations apply. Regarding universities, I don't think the issue is that some category is over-represented, but the fairness of the admission process. That being said, with affirmative action, the admission process is already biased and isn't on academical merit alone.
So you're saying that Catholic seminaries are required to admit muslims that want to become imams, and therefore the Catholic seminaries will be required to start a islamic department to train muslims to become imams? (rhetorical question).
So as far as the fairness of the admission process goes, all applicants should apply with no name, race, creed, or any type of way to identify who and where someone comes from? Do away with essays as they are super easy way to identify the background of an applicant? Pure test scores only?
I totally disagree with your saying that the issue isn't with some categories are over-represented. That's just not the case at all.