This has been going on in South Korea for a while, but to the best of my knowledge, only as a service to your own children or relatives: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=201910231... Doing it in exchange for money may have been invented/popularized in the US.
As long as college is an acceptable, and legal signal to use in the hiring process nothing will ever change. It's prisoner's dilemma. The "better" schools will always incentivize more and more pathological behavior in order to get a competitive advantage.
I propose that similar to age and gender, college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications. If there is indeed an advantage of going to a better school than this will manifest itself in the actual interview process. If there is not, then it will be quickly realized that it doesn't make any sense to jump through these hoops to go to the better schools and thus the problem solved.
It's unlikely to happen as most legislators in the USA went to the very same schools that one is attempting to gain admittance to - a clear conflict of interest.
> I propose that similar to age and gender, college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications.
That's never going to work for specialized jobs. If you need a chemical engineer, than you need a chemical engineer.
But I think this is a very good idea for all of those jobs that just say "4 year degree required" without any specialty. Honestly, I don't understand how such postings aren't already illegal under structural discrimination.
You get a degree. You can prove that you got the degree from an accredited university, if that university is providing some cryptographic form of that degree, without revealing the name of that university.
This only works if multiple universities sign on to a ZKP scheme, because (obviously) if only a single university did this you would know which university it was.
Not all degrees are the same. Not everyone needs to be Ivy League. But especially with the current waive of partisan fuckery in higher education, I want to make sure I’m not getting a dud. If that information is literally banned, you’re going to emphasise hiring through informal channels, i.e. the well connected.
It's probably law degrees where schools (and clerkships) probably have the most sway--especially for big city law firms. For MBAs, schools probably carry out-sized weight for new grads in some specific areas like management consulting and investment banking.
> For MBAs, schools probably carry out-sized weight for new grads in some specific areas like management consulting and investment banking
I've seen a huge variance in MBA-graduate quality between schools, to the point that if you're not graduating from one of the top schools I question the value of not only the degree but the candidate for failing to see that. As for undergraduates, the value the top schools deliver is consistency more than quality--you're unlikely to be horribly embarrassed by the Stanford or Georgia Tech grade in a way you are one out of ASU.
> From our experience there's no difference between Ivies and good State schools
Sorry if I was unclear, I agree. My point was there is a difference between good state schools and random schools. The latter aren't bad. They just take vetting, as there's a greater you-get-what-you-put-in dynamic at play.
Engineering degrees are governed by ABET. It's trivial for schools to email their list of graduates to ABET. Other fields have similar certifications and/or degree-independent licensing exams like CPA and actuary.
Problem is, that'll just shift competition somewhere else. This has already happened in Tech to some extent, where the interview process has gone exponential in just the last few years.
We need to aim closer to the root, at the economic concentrations in society that all this competition is about trying to access.
In a world of independent artisans, we wouldn't need to worry so much about all this status and hierarchy and gatekeeping.
But there are a handful of FAANGs that reign unnaturally like giant totalitarian states. It's like we have Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, when we're supposed to have The Netherlands, Italy, Thailand, Vietnam, and so on. Instead it's like some Tsar expanding over the whole of Eurasia. And you need to get into the bastard's court.
I do see your point. But I feel we only need to look at, say, passing the exams to get into IIT, or at the South Korean school system, to see where this leads. At some point it's just too much, and it doesn't matter how fairly the Hunger Games are administered.
Let me put it another way: It's extremely destructive to a society if too much effort is channeled into zero-sum competition within that society.
Mostly rhetoric, but it gestured towards some mathematical/modeling intuition.
I was picturing a graph with time on the x axis, difficulty on the y, and a fairly constant value until recently, at which point things began to increase rapidly. I had in mind instability and explosion, a mania like for tulips, and self-destructive involution, like a society locked in competition with itself to pass the Emperor's exams.
Why an exponential? I know that, in contrast, finance people speak of things going "parabolic". But there may be reason for literal exponentials, for dx/dt = x. It's not that difficulty begets difficulty, but that difficulty arises from economic concentration and concentration of opportunities, and economic concentration begets economic concentration.
Well, the obvious answer has to do with the fact that a shared money system allows money to be concentrated regionally which in turn means that people have to follow the money to where it is being concentrated.
The most prominent example is Greece being drained of Euros and of its young workers who have no choice but to go to work in Germany. Then the Germans complain about immigration without realising that they encourage this with their economic policy. They think these things are two separate problems that require separate solutions, when in reality they are the same problem.
This is stupid. We can just demand, or even mandate, that colleges not suck so hard. They've basically turned into hedge funds at this point, we have quite a bit of leverage as a society and we don't have to let all this stuff happen.
I'm exhausted by the current narrative that says we can't demand excellence from public institutions.
Like why not. Why can't universities, the police, the department of homeless services, or the guys who regulate airplane safety not be competently run and effective at improving society? Why can't we improve them?
By what criteria do they suck? Regardless, it doesn’t seem relevant to what I’m suggesting. Even if colleges were perfect there were still be disparities if only due to the student demographics and the problem in the OP would still exist.
They hoard tens of billions of dollars tax free and use that money to fund private equity firms who buy and destroy American jobs, while becoming an increasingly bloated service firm for the richest American families, and are almost complexly divorced at this point from their original public purpose of academic progress and educating the next generation.
this seems completely irrelevant to the article, and still has nothing to do with school quality. what you're saying could be true and still be an academic powerhouse.
the point is that even if the signal was valid, the college admissions ploy described in the OP would still be true. fundamentally the signal should be in the actual quality of a specific candidate, not some approximate proxy for the school name.
Why would it be true? Colleges could, in fact, not reward the bullshit resume padding of wealthy families. They could also fire literally half the admin staff, which is approaching an astonishing 1:1 ratio of staff to students at a lot of these prestigious colleges.
They don't reward this bullshit resume padding because they are confused they do it because they want to.
The incentives for college administrators are basically all financial at this point, it's about tuition and donors. Like I said, academic culture has been overtaken by the culture of financialization.
Consider this thought experiment - what would you do if you wanted to publicly say you did "need blind" admissions where you really promise not to look at the actual financial status of applicants at all, but you actually wanted to avoid admitting too many people who weren't going to pay full price?
If those were the incentives you were facing, then you'd try to come up with signals to use as a proxy for just asking applicants if they are rich.
We can't improve all of these institutions because they are either directly run or mostly financed by governments, and governments are driven by politics.
Seems to me that everything completely went to shit when we turned over activities that governments have traditionally done to private sector grifters.
That's not what we did. Governments certainly hire private sector grifters as contractors; but those contractors still rely on the coercive power of the government to force people to comply with whatever rules they are operating under. So the grifters are still government actors in the sense that matters: people can't choose to just ignore them or not deal with them, as would be the case with a true private sector company.
Fine. 30% is a big walkback from the original framing. Clearly the topics in this thread are more of a "university" thing than "private vs public" thing.
I meant 30% of the money, since we inexplicably let people write it off on their taxes when they bribe elitist colleges to let their various family members in.
Public institutions are great. They have classes for the gamut of abilities and majors. What's not great is privilege->credential laundering through grade-inflated "elite" private schools, where the education is irrelevant to the scheme.
I think this is already happening, to some extent. Back in the day, all the smart folks would flock to a handful of top universities. But now, things are changing. The reliance on SAT and merit is decreasing, and universities are focusing more on DEI when admitting students. This means that the cream of the crop won't be concentrated in just a few elite schools anymore. As a result, companies will start looking beyond the usual suspects and consider a broader range of candidates when hiring.
> Seems ridiculous to me, why would teens even have peer-reviewed papers, or even papers, to their name?
The same reason they'd have any number of other (real, non-scam) competitive advantages in applications, a combination of aptitude and privilege allowing it to be recognized and to have the opportunity to exploit it.
Plenty of teens have legitimate papers. Probably not first author but it's not hard to believe that an IOM Medalist could contribute to a Mathematics paper or an Intel Science winner would contribute to a Biology paper e.g.
The tragedy here is that widespread abuses will water down the signal for those few high school students who do legitimately contribute to research.
My wife worked in an academic hospital affiliated lab during her PhD, and every summer they had several of these children of lab friends "volunteering" as research assistants. Some were so colossally incompetent, messing up equipment or never showing up, etc. it was a net productivity loss.
>Seems ridiculous to me, why would teens even have peer-reviewed papers, or even papers, to their name?
Pretty much only because of this scam - so an automatic 'fraud' signal IMHO.
For reference the comment I was responding to implied that the ONLY way for a teen to be an author on a paper was because of this scam. I was pointing out that that is obviously not the case.
A couple prodigies might. But Bayes would probably lean toward fraud pretty heavily.
I could also see a highschooler collecting data, maybe? Like, you don’t need a college degree to go down to a local lake and test water quality, right? Would that warrant a spot on the list of authors?
> why would teens even have peer-reviewed papers, or even papers, to their name?
Keep in mind that when you're talking about the Ivys, they admit a tiny fraction of the people who apply and a huge number of people don't bother applying because (probably correctly) they don't think it's likely they'd get in.
Behavior 3-4 std dev out may be quite a bit different than behavior at the median.
> The prospect appealed to Sophia. “Nowadays, having a publication is kind of a given” for college applicants, she said. “If you don’t have one, you’re going to have to make it up in some other aspect of your application.”
This is just so foreign to me. Either that service has very convincing salespeople that have wormed into her brain or she's living in a very odd academic bubble.
I've met lots of college students and most of could barely write a coherent by the time they graduate from college. No way is "having a published paper" a pre-req for admission.
A counterpoint - Some of the US national labs have summer internship programs that can lead to legit publications, if the project is scaffolded well and the student works hard. I’m a coauthor on such a paper with a student from a local high school. She did a really great job during her internship and is wrapping up a degree at MIT now.
What "problem"? The applicants with papers are demonstrating that their families have plenty of money, that they are eager to game the college admissions system, and that they're happy to genuflect before the alter of academic elitism. What better signals could there be, for the sort of applicants who colleges actually want to admit?
Edit: Okay, if a kid's family bought him an Axiom Space ticket or few, that'd clearly be better.
Having reviewed articles can be a legitimate signal. My brother started working in high school on research that was ultimately published in a peer reviewed physics journal. (Maybe if he’d gotten that article out before graduation he wouldn’t have gotten dinged at MIT.) But he only had that opportunity because he went to an elite public school in Virginia that had a program to get students internships with the dozens of defense industry research labs in the area. Not exactly something that’s available to folks in Iowa, where my wife went to high school.
And getting published in a non-science journal probably provides a much weaker signal. For cultural reasons, lots of families wouldn’t even think it would be worthwhile to have their kid published in say a social science journal. (My dad, who has a sociology degree, told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t allowed to major in the subject.)
Really it’s another reason that college admissions should just be based on test scores and grades. If the kids are poor—give them an $1,000 scholarship to take an PowerScore class. (That’s just a fraction of what even poor school districts spend on each student annually.) Everything else is so wildly subjective or unevenly available to kids around the country.
This is why I'm so skeptical that de-prioritizing SAT/ACT scores will make college admissions more equitable.
Yes, the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep. Unfortunately, rich applicants can also pay to boost whatever other signal is used by the admissions committee. Extracurriculars? Those violin lessons didn't pay for themselves! High School internship? Consider which families have the connections to find those opportunities. And now research papers...
I actually think standardized test scores are considerably less subject to bias than anything else!
IMO, the only actual solution is to specifically consider socioeconomic background as part of the admissions process. But everyone hates that because it feels unfair. And it is unfair, but that's the point—any system we come up with will be unfair, so we have to find the least-unfair one.
> rich applicants can also pay to boost whatever other signal
This applies to all signals. "It will be gamed. No exceptions."
If you care about being equitable, there is no way to fix the elite university system. There are by definition only a few elite universities and they can only admit a small fraction of the population. Even if it were a lottery it'd still exclude the vast majority of people.
I feel like a lot of the over-the-top "wokeness" coming out of places like Yale is a case of "they doth protest too much." The vanguard institutions of an inherently discriminatory elitist system of conferred nobility are trying to deflect from this by blathering about diversity. The nobles are lecturing us about how woke they are in the hope of distracting us from the fact that we are not and probably never can be nobility.
The only real solution is to make that system obsolete. A person should be hired on the basis of their ability to do the job well. Nothing else. No degrees. No name dropping. No elitism based on what region of the country you're from or where you went to school. Just ability.
Colleges would only be able to justify their existence (and cost) by arguing that they are good places to learn and hone one's abilities. This would not only be more equitable but might allow people to get into the workforce without a writ of indenture in the form of a giant student loan to repay.
Reasonable standards + lottery selections is far less gameable. And it has the right incentives, as it pressures rich folks to develop more high-quality universities.
I can talk to someone for 20 minutes and know if they can be a good engineer on our projects. I don't need secondary signals.
I'm willing to bet that anyone who knows any area well can do the same thing. A construction worker can probably talk to someone for 20 minutes and tell if they can work on a construction site.
It does mean that bureaucrats who don't actually know an area can't hire people for that area, but they've never been good at that.
For qualified interviewers secondary signals are only useful at the initial filtering stage of deciding who to interview. For that I've found that some mix of (has gone to any college | has worked in the field | has side projects or hobby projects in the field) combined with just describing the job and asking them if they could do it is good enough. Then a quick 20 minute call determines if they're worth talking to more. Then a longer call with some questions and involving other team members, then maybe a test project and/or reference checks if possible.
That would require for you to be a well-rounded person that hasn’t optimized for only one facet of the job (e.g. money, technical skill, etc.) — at that point might as well be an entrepreneur.
It would also require that your interviewees are not comprised of psychos willing to take whatever measure necessary to get what they want (i.e. play the game/talk the talk) — which usually does not happen when a lot of money or power is being offered.
That's cause the goal is not equity but to make the process more opaque, so they can admit legacy kids without issue, and enough students from various demographic groups at a volume they desire without anyone pointing to any embarrassing measures like SAT scores showing discrimination.
I don't understand what you're arguing. The legacy admits' SAT scores were higher than non-legacy. The Asians suing Harvard argued the legacy admissions were used as a backdoor for white people specifically. It has nothing to do with equity.
That doesn't change the incentive for the admissions committee to find a way to admit the left tail of legacies without criticism.
If they want to take all the money that's on the table, they have to admit all the kids whose parents they want to incentivize to donate, regardless of their test scores.
I did some math on this with statistics that are available. I was as conservative as I could be. I assumed an SAT score std dev of 240. I used the legacy score of 1523 as the mean. I assumed a normal curve. I took the highest bound on percent of white admitted students who are legacy: 35% (in reality at Harvard it's probably a lot less). I used Harvard's current student body stats:{1984 admitted students and ~40% white}.
I found that only 2% of the incoming class would be theoretical white people who were admitted with legacy status and who fell to the left of 1 std dev in SAT score. If these people exist, I don't know what other circumstances might exist for them. Their SAT score is still high by US standards and they may be athletes or overlap with some other category for all I know or something else.
I think the below average legacy admit trope is actually deployed as a racial stereotype of white students that the SFFA, who are Asian, are using to gain access to Harvard. I don't think the hypothetical upper bound of 2% which is ~40 students is meaningful.
Now there is one issue with this which is that we don't have legacy student SAT scores broken down by race. But other sources suggest legacy students are disproportionately white. This is not true of the student body generally.
This is a calculation on the distribution of admitted students. It isn't relevant to my point that elite colleges stand to benefit from admitting more legacies regardless of test performance.
If anything, if Harvard only admits high-performing legacies today, it only bolsters the case for how much more legacies they could admit with a more opaque, "holistic" process.
Which, mind you, is something similar to other things they've done historically.
ya that's valid. I don't think there is a clean answer about who should be admitted but my attempt was just to show that the dumb legacy trope doesn't seem to be completely factual. But yes, children of Harvard alumni probably have an advantage. But then again the legacies may be talented students.
There are a number of papers making related claims. The typical conclusion is: test prep helps, but paying for test prep is only marginally better than self study.
For some strange reason they are often summarized as "test prep had no effect".
The context is often "Can someone buy themselves into a better college by paying for test prep?"
But yes. If only because of the time constraints of the test (and it's more than that), sitting down and taking the SAT cold would be really hard for most people without prior exposure to similar tests. Heck, I'm pretty sure I couldn't today. I'm guessing I would do pretty well on verbal but too much of the math would be way too far in the past. And I wouldn't have time to derive formulae even if I remembered enough first principles to do so.
Yeah. And the context often assumes that dollars are expensive, minutes are cheap, and knowledge is free.
Test prep certainly helps. Knowing that test prep helps is key knowledge that is suppressed by these studies. Having the time to engage in test prep is often a luxury. Having the skill and discipline to do effective test prep is a lot to ask.
Everything I've seen suggests that, once you get beyond familiarizing yourself with the basic form of the test which you can do with a test prep book from the library, you get into pretty diminishing returns relative to free/almost free resources.
Of course, heaving learned the material in the first place and doing a modicum of test prep so the test isn't a wholly unfamiliar thing is still important but it's probably fair to say that the SAT is far less gameable by spending money than many things.
The fact that some rich people literally went to prison for paying someone to take their kid’s SAT illustrates there are limits to much scores can be improved even with coaching.
I agree - I did a fair amount of SAT tutoring, and there's no question in my mind that preparation improves performance. However, all preparation is basically the same - take a practice test and see what you need to improve, then learn like a dozen tricks (on a math question you should maybe try plugging in the answers and calculating rather than doing algebra, get a good night's sleep, bring two pencils, ...).
These resources are essentially free - there's not much that an in-person class teaches that isn't available in a test-prep book from the local library.
Now, you need to know the book exists, go to the library, check out that book, read it, and do the exercises. Having a parent pay for classes dramatically lowers that bar (they'll get you out of bed and into a tutoring classroom on a sunny summer Saturday), but, unlike virtually everything else on a resume, money can't actually buy you that much of an advantage on the materials available.
It seems to me that a good standardized test score is one of the only things that someone with a lot of motivation and talent, but very few resources, can use to distinguish themselves.
> It seems to me that a good standardized test score is one of the only things that someone with a lot of motivation and talent, but very few resources, can use to distinguish themselves.
That's the way poor immigrant Asian kids and rural whites did it a generation ago. Nowadays, CRT activists are trying to get "holistic" criterions to be used by admission committee. [0] You guessed it, they also argue that the SAT should be de-emphasized.
There is nothing about CRT activists in the link you posted, and if anything the "tag" criteria seem to favour children of alumni and people from well-connected, wealthy backgrounds.
Isn't this a good thing. Yes - rich folks can pay for prep. But at least the not so rich folks know "what" to pay for and can try to plan for it early on. As much as I hate standardized tests, I hate opaque arbitrary subjective decision making by random gatekeepers with vested interests and biases.
> the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep.
Its not just rich, it favors boys across all economic classes. I think one of the ideas was that de-prioritizing SAT/ACT will get more women into stem.
SAT/ACT difficulty ceiling is too low. 10% applicants scored higher than 1350, which is around 1350/1600 = 81%. Should made it so only less than 1% applicants scored higher than 80%.
Why is that too low? It seems like 250 points and 20% of the questions is plenty of room to distinguish the good from the excellent. Even the most elite universities don't need to distinguish between the top 0.1% and the top 0.5%.
10% of applicants getting the top marks 1600/1600 - which happens on other tests! - would indicate a problem.
It's been a long time since I've known someone involved with admissions at a top school. But my understanding was that not only were quantitative academic scores only part of the process, but by aand large they didn't really use SATs to fine tune admission decisions at the very top of the scale. They used SATs to set an academic floor and, while higher was better, that was only one of the factors in play at that point.
Except as I wrote earlier, most top schools in the US don't care about discriminating using standardized tests to that degree. They want to apply a reasonable filter and then move on to other aspects of the application. One may disagree with that approach but pretty much no top school in the US wants to admit solely (or maybe even primarily) on the basis of a standardized test score.
This was my thought. Should be very difficult to score high, with score as close to IQ as possible (100=1000). We'll see how many people get a 1600 at that point.
> Yes, the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep.
"Rich" is the wrong word here and really distorts the comparison. A typical in-person SAT prep class is $1,000-$1,500. This is a one-time expense you can plan for over a number of years. That's affordable to the vast majority of the population in a country where 87% of teenagers own an iPhone: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/11/teen-survey-iphone-owne.... As for time, only 20% of teenagers work while enrolled in school. Only about 1/3 have a job during the summer. Yes, there are kids who are homeless, etc. Spending $1,000 and a couple of days a week in the summer going to prep classes might not be achievable for kids in the very bottom rung of society. But it's quite approachable for kids in the lower middle class and up. It's not only the "rich."
By contrast, a lot of college resume boosters are only available to the rich and well-connected. Lower middle class probably don't know anyone who works at a human-rights non-profit who can help secure an interesting internship. Most parents don't have the time to get their kids involved at the Olympic level in some obscure sport. As a matter of geography, many of the things that stand out to admissions officers at elite universities don't really exist in middle America; and the things that do, such as involvement in high-school football or FFA, are looked down upon.
There's also a matter of cultural capital. Pretty much everyone knows you should study for tests. That's a no-brainer, and accessible to all cultural groups. But figuring out what will pique the interest of some WASP in Harvard's admissions office takes special cultural knowledge. I was joking with my wife that our daughter's diversity essay should be about going to Bangladesh and getting in touch with her fundamentalist Muslim roots (my dad's grandfather was an imam). But we hang around enough rich white people to know that's not what they mean by "diversity." Instead, it would be far more helpful for her to go back to Bangladesh and fight against Bangladeshis to legalize abortion. That's what they mean by diversity.
> I was joking with my wife that our daughter's diversity essay should be about going to Bangladesh and getting in touch with her fundamentalist Muslim roots (my dad's grandfather was an imam).
...that actually sounds to me like it could be a great diversity essay, I don't think I agree with your interpretation.
Compared to fighting for legalizing abortion in Bangladesh though? Getting in touch with her roots is great and all, culture heritage yadda yadda. But the fight for women's rights will really engage the essay readers and make them want to have her in their school.
I’m sure an essay on how arranged marriage and Islamic gender roles are great for women would go over well with the white ladies in the admissions office.
> But figuring out what will pique the interest of some WASP in Harvard's admissions office takes special cultural knowledge.
Given that the Ivy League is only 33% non-Jewish white (compared to ~55% of the US population), and Jewish students have a ~12x better chance than non-Jewish whites at Ivy League admission [1], and are 7x over-represented compared to their US population, while whites are 0.56x under-represented, maybe it's not WASP cultural knowledge you should be targeting.
Saying that a $1000 SAT prep class is affordable is arguably true but also greatly undersells the case for the SAT. There's never been a time in history with more free, high-quality test prep resources. They're just as easy to come by as TV and video games. The only issue is motivation. And you can't do anything for an unmotivated kid that's socioeconomically fair. You can spend a lot of money to try and motivate them, or spend a lot of money to have others do things for them that they can take credit for, but those are things that only the wealthier can do.
With the SAT, motivated kids are on the most level playing field in the history of civilization. And that's the best you can do without making society much more redistributive, which no one in this college admissions conversation is offering as an option anyway.
Frankly, I think hating on the SAT is either woefully misguided, or a cynical ploy to appear good without being good. And in the case of elite college admissions committees, I lean towards the latter. Am I supposed to believe that the people running these elite institutions can't think of simple stuff like this? They probably thought it all through before announcing anything to us common folk.
We often get groups like this trying to sponsor our events and buy emails of our students. It's disgusting. We also sometimes get their counselors trying to "collaborate" with us to get one of their projects published.
The competitive college application process and supporting industry of consultants is creating a generation of sociopaths. We are teaching young people that the way to get ahead in life is to lie, cheat, steal, exaggerate, and hire consultants to help you do it with class.
Over the past few months, I have spoken with some of the admissions leaders behind "top" institutions. They say that in many cases, it's hard for them to tell the difference between these applicants and "real" applicants. Most CS programs still don't even look at the GitHubs of applicants!
I don't see how github would be good indicator of anything. One could buy one when they come popular. Maybe even let it run for year or two with regular automated commits to make it look reasonable.
With AI generating content would be simpler than ever...
All the names in the linked papers are Indian ( and Chinese) . My boy is half indian and we are thinking of moving to school dist with 90% indian Americans. I have this gnawing feeling that he might face brutal pressure to compete,strive and could make him a less happy child. I don't know what to make of it.
A year ago or so when China did a major crackdown on ed-tech and the private tutoring and education sector I read a lot of outraged stuff about it, but this kind of thing is the logical end result. A 17 year old writing a fake paper on chick-fil-A, 'peer-reviewed' by some non-existent degree mill to get a leg up on completely opaque college admissions.
Just make it simple. Stick with the SAT tests. There is nothing more equitable than standardized, rigorous testing. It will not be perfectly equitable because people do differ in their abilities, but they do differ less on that front than their parents wallets do. Which is of course why it's the more privileged households that love lobbying for these bogus qualifications instead of just doing merit based tests.
Just remember a simple fact, intellect is distributed on a Bell curve, money follows a power law distribution. Whenever you're concerned that merit based processes may have unequal results, anything that can be turned into pay-to-win is going to be worse.
And if SAT is a bad test. Come up with better one. Just need to get enough schools to sing up for one at same time. Then just run same test in multiple locations at one time and allow using the results everywhere.
> 'peer-reviewed' by some non-existent degree mill
That's what poor people will do and it is easy to filter for degree mills. Upper middle class people will pay PhD students to add their kid name to decent papers as second author. Rich people will pay PhD post doc to put their kid as first or sole author. Billionaires will sponsor Nobel laureate lab and have kid as co-author on ground breaking paper that will get 1000+ citations in first year.
From time to time the media will release puff pieces about a "genius" high school student that discovered something/invented something/won some national science fair "with the help of a local university lab/professor".
I used to think that these actually were genius kids that spent their free time pursuing scholarly pursuits and somehow befriending professors.
But what I've seen happen (multiple times) is that a lab PI convinces one of their grad-students/post-docs that "it would be a great mentorship opportunity for you to have <highshool student that just so happens to be my friend's kid> finish up that project you've been working on".
The end result is that some well-connected kid gets credit for the whole project on their applications, but the grad-student/post-doc that has already done 95% of the work just has to hand it over and can't use/publish their own experiment
My personal anecdotes: I came to know some of these "genius" kids from a forum I used to run. They really were quite bright and had unusual interests on top of that. Of course they also came from financially comfortable families that could afford to build a home laboratory. Their financial peers had parents who would give children international vacations or horse riding lessons; their parents bought them used industrial/scientific equipment from eBay. They exited high school early and went on to R1 research universities.
Put yourself in the position of an elite school and it makes a lot more sense: who would you rather get, the student who gets decent grades and worked a part time job during high school or the kid of parents who can afford these signaling activities? To pay off all the fancy amenities I would go with the kid with the rich parents 100% of the time.
There does seem to be a general misunderstanding of what Peer-Reviewed means among the public. At my kids highschool there was an AIM program for harder classes for the academically inclined. A parent's kid didn't get in, they decided to write up a piece on how AIM should be killed. They showed it to another parent, called it peered reviewed, and submitted it to the school. The school at a meeting after they turned off the cameras decided to fire the lead teach and kill the program.
All without any discussion, because it was a "peer reviewed" "paper".
> The first reader “is very young and in almost all cases majored in humanities or social sciences,” said Jon Reider, a former admissions officer at Stanford. “They can’t tell if a paper in the sciences means anything or is new at all.”
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[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadI propose that similar to age and gender, college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications. If there is indeed an advantage of going to a better school than this will manifest itself in the actual interview process. If there is not, then it will be quickly realized that it doesn't make any sense to jump through these hoops to go to the better schools and thus the problem solved.
It's unlikely to happen as most legislators in the USA went to the very same schools that one is attempting to gain admittance to - a clear conflict of interest.
That's never going to work for specialized jobs. If you need a chemical engineer, than you need a chemical engineer.
But I think this is a very good idea for all of those jobs that just say "4 year degree required" without any specialty. Honestly, I don't understand how such postings aren't already illegal under structural discrimination.
Whether college is required at all is also an interesting discussion.
You get a degree. You can prove that you got the degree from an accredited university, if that university is providing some cryptographic form of that degree, without revealing the name of that university.
This only works if multiple universities sign on to a ZKP scheme, because (obviously) if only a single university did this you would know which university it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#
Not always easy to do.
That's part of the reason why school name matters a lot more for MBAs than software developers.
I've seen a huge variance in MBA-graduate quality between schools, to the point that if you're not graduating from one of the top schools I question the value of not only the degree but the candidate for failing to see that. As for undergraduates, the value the top schools deliver is consistency more than quality--you're unlikely to be horribly embarrassed by the Stanford or Georgia Tech grade in a way you are one out of ASU.
Nobody has time for that. Not comprehensively, except for very senior hires or limited-scope roles.
Especially with affirmative action, it's way harder for a White or Asian male to get a spot at some universities.
Sorry if I was unclear, I agree. My point was there is a difference between good state schools and random schools. The latter aren't bad. They just take vetting, as there's a greater you-get-what-you-put-in dynamic at play.
We need to aim closer to the root, at the economic concentrations in society that all this competition is about trying to access.
In a world of independent artisans, we wouldn't need to worry so much about all this status and hierarchy and gatekeeping.
But there are a handful of FAANGs that reign unnaturally like giant totalitarian states. It's like we have Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, when we're supposed to have The Netherlands, Italy, Thailand, Vietnam, and so on. Instead it's like some Tsar expanding over the whole of Eurasia. And you need to get into the bastard's court.
Let me put it another way: It's extremely destructive to a society if too much effort is channeled into zero-sum competition within that society.
What does that mean?
I was picturing a graph with time on the x axis, difficulty on the y, and a fairly constant value until recently, at which point things began to increase rapidly. I had in mind instability and explosion, a mania like for tulips, and self-destructive involution, like a society locked in competition with itself to pass the Emperor's exams.
Why an exponential? I know that, in contrast, finance people speak of things going "parabolic". But there may be reason for literal exponentials, for dx/dt = x. It's not that difficulty begets difficulty, but that difficulty arises from economic concentration and concentration of opportunities, and economic concentration begets economic concentration.
The most prominent example is Greece being drained of Euros and of its young workers who have no choice but to go to work in Germany. Then the Germans complain about immigration without realising that they encourage this with their economic policy. They think these things are two separate problems that require separate solutions, when in reality they are the same problem.
I'm exhausted by the current narrative that says we can't demand excellence from public institutions.
Like why not. Why can't universities, the police, the department of homeless services, or the guys who regulate airplane safety not be competently run and effective at improving society? Why can't we improve them?
> college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications
By saying maybe we could, instead, try to improve the reputations of our best colleges so the signal would be valid.
They don't reward this bullshit resume padding because they are confused they do it because they want to.
The incentives for college administrators are basically all financial at this point, it's about tuition and donors. Like I said, academic culture has been overtaken by the culture of financialization.
Consider this thought experiment - what would you do if you wanted to publicly say you did "need blind" admissions where you really promise not to look at the actual financial status of applicants at all, but you actually wanted to avoid admitting too many people who weren't going to pay full price?
If those were the incentives you were facing, then you'd try to come up with signals to use as a proxy for just asking applicants if they are rich.
Can we see what's going on here now?
Pretty much only because of this scam - so an automatic 'fraud' signal IMHO.
The same reason they'd have any number of other (real, non-scam) competitive advantages in applications, a combination of aptitude and privilege allowing it to be recognized and to have the opportunity to exploit it.
My wife worked in an academic hospital affiliated lab during her PhD, and every summer they had several of these children of lab friends "volunteering" as research assistants. Some were so colossally incompetent, messing up equipment or never showing up, etc. it was a net productivity loss.
Pretty much only because of this scam - so an automatic 'fraud' signal IMHO.
For reference the comment I was responding to implied that the ONLY way for a teen to be an author on a paper was because of this scam. I was pointing out that that is obviously not the case.
I could also see a highschooler collecting data, maybe? Like, you don’t need a college degree to go down to a local lake and test water quality, right? Would that warrant a spot on the list of authors?
I really just don't see one as great criteria. Or quality of papers to be anyway decent.
And for those geniuses, maybe they could have exceptions made for.
Keep in mind that when you're talking about the Ivys, they admit a tiny fraction of the people who apply and a huge number of people don't bother applying because (probably correctly) they don't think it's likely they'd get in.
Behavior 3-4 std dev out may be quite a bit different than behavior at the median.
This is just so foreign to me. Either that service has very convincing salespeople that have wormed into her brain or she's living in a very odd academic bubble.
I've met lots of college students and most of could barely write a coherent by the time they graduate from college. No way is "having a published paper" a pre-req for admission.
Simply ignore publications for the obvious reason --- they are easily faked and authorship is suspect. Problem solved.
And the better a college is perceived to be in the current higher ed environment, the stronger that incentive is.
Edit: Okay, if a kid's family bought him an Axiom Space ticket or few, that'd clearly be better.
And getting published in a non-science journal probably provides a much weaker signal. For cultural reasons, lots of families wouldn’t even think it would be worthwhile to have their kid published in say a social science journal. (My dad, who has a sociology degree, told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t allowed to major in the subject.)
Really it’s another reason that college admissions should just be based on test scores and grades. If the kids are poor—give them an $1,000 scholarship to take an PowerScore class. (That’s just a fraction of what even poor school districts spend on each student annually.) Everything else is so wildly subjective or unevenly available to kids around the country.
Yes, the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep. Unfortunately, rich applicants can also pay to boost whatever other signal is used by the admissions committee. Extracurriculars? Those violin lessons didn't pay for themselves! High School internship? Consider which families have the connections to find those opportunities. And now research papers...
I actually think standardized test scores are considerably less subject to bias than anything else!
IMO, the only actual solution is to specifically consider socioeconomic background as part of the admissions process. But everyone hates that because it feels unfair. And it is unfair, but that's the point—any system we come up with will be unfair, so we have to find the least-unfair one.
Less connections than being able to get to and from a non-paying internship.
This applies to all signals. "It will be gamed. No exceptions."
If you care about being equitable, there is no way to fix the elite university system. There are by definition only a few elite universities and they can only admit a small fraction of the population. Even if it were a lottery it'd still exclude the vast majority of people.
I feel like a lot of the over-the-top "wokeness" coming out of places like Yale is a case of "they doth protest too much." The vanguard institutions of an inherently discriminatory elitist system of conferred nobility are trying to deflect from this by blathering about diversity. The nobles are lecturing us about how woke they are in the hope of distracting us from the fact that we are not and probably never can be nobility.
The only real solution is to make that system obsolete. A person should be hired on the basis of their ability to do the job well. Nothing else. No degrees. No name dropping. No elitism based on what region of the country you're from or where you went to school. Just ability.
Colleges would only be able to justify their existence (and cost) by arguing that they are good places to learn and hone one's abilities. This would not only be more equitable but might allow people to get into the workforce without a writ of indenture in the form of a giant student loan to repay.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53316895
And how do you do that? The reason education is considered is because it's a signal of who can do the job well.
I'm willing to bet that anyone who knows any area well can do the same thing. A construction worker can probably talk to someone for 20 minutes and tell if they can work on a construction site.
It does mean that bureaucrats who don't actually know an area can't hire people for that area, but they've never been good at that.
For qualified interviewers secondary signals are only useful at the initial filtering stage of deciding who to interview. For that I've found that some mix of (has gone to any college | has worked in the field | has side projects or hobby projects in the field) combined with just describing the job and asking them if they could do it is good enough. Then a quick 20 minute call determines if they're worth talking to more. Then a longer call with some questions and involving other team members, then maybe a test project and/or reference checks if possible.
It would also require that your interviewees are not comprised of psychos willing to take whatever measure necessary to get what they want (i.e. play the game/talk the talk) — which usually does not happen when a lot of money or power is being offered.
Can't have those pesky, studious asians suing the schools, after all.
If they want to take all the money that's on the table, they have to admit all the kids whose parents they want to incentivize to donate, regardless of their test scores.
I found that only 2% of the incoming class would be theoretical white people who were admitted with legacy status and who fell to the left of 1 std dev in SAT score. If these people exist, I don't know what other circumstances might exist for them. Their SAT score is still high by US standards and they may be athletes or overlap with some other category for all I know or something else.
I think the below average legacy admit trope is actually deployed as a racial stereotype of white students that the SFFA, who are Asian, are using to gain access to Harvard. I don't think the hypothetical upper bound of 2% which is ~40 students is meaningful.
Now there is one issue with this which is that we don't have legacy student SAT scores broken down by race. But other sources suggest legacy students are disproportionately white. This is not true of the student body generally.
If anything, if Harvard only admits high-performing legacies today, it only bolsters the case for how much more legacies they could admit with a more opaque, "holistic" process.
Which, mind you, is something similar to other things they've done historically.
For some strange reason they are often summarized as "test prep had no effect".
But yes. If only because of the time constraints of the test (and it's more than that), sitting down and taking the SAT cold would be really hard for most people without prior exposure to similar tests. Heck, I'm pretty sure I couldn't today. I'm guessing I would do pretty well on verbal but too much of the math would be way too far in the past. And I wouldn't have time to derive formulae even if I remembered enough first principles to do so.
Test prep certainly helps. Knowing that test prep helps is key knowledge that is suppressed by these studies. Having the time to engage in test prep is often a luxury. Having the skill and discipline to do effective test prep is a lot to ask.
This is part of what colleges are selecting for.
Of course, heaving learned the material in the first place and doing a modicum of test prep so the test isn't a wholly unfamiliar thing is still important but it's probably fair to say that the SAT is far less gameable by spending money than many things.
These resources are essentially free - there's not much that an in-person class teaches that isn't available in a test-prep book from the local library.
Now, you need to know the book exists, go to the library, check out that book, read it, and do the exercises. Having a parent pay for classes dramatically lowers that bar (they'll get you out of bed and into a tutoring classroom on a sunny summer Saturday), but, unlike virtually everything else on a resume, money can't actually buy you that much of an advantage on the materials available.
It seems to me that a good standardized test score is one of the only things that someone with a lot of motivation and talent, but very few resources, can use to distinguish themselves.
That's the way poor immigrant Asian kids and rural whites did it a generation ago. Nowadays, CRT activists are trying to get "holistic" criterions to be used by admission committee. [0] You guessed it, they also argue that the SAT should be de-emphasized.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian-...
Its not just rich, it favors boys across all economic classes. I think one of the ideas was that de-prioritizing SAT/ACT will get more women into stem.
[1] https://feed.georgetown.edu/access-affordability/women-incre...
10% of applicants getting the top marks 1600/1600 - which happens on other tests! - would indicate a problem.
"Rich" is the wrong word here and really distorts the comparison. A typical in-person SAT prep class is $1,000-$1,500. This is a one-time expense you can plan for over a number of years. That's affordable to the vast majority of the population in a country where 87% of teenagers own an iPhone: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/11/teen-survey-iphone-owne.... As for time, only 20% of teenagers work while enrolled in school. Only about 1/3 have a job during the summer. Yes, there are kids who are homeless, etc. Spending $1,000 and a couple of days a week in the summer going to prep classes might not be achievable for kids in the very bottom rung of society. But it's quite approachable for kids in the lower middle class and up. It's not only the "rich."
By contrast, a lot of college resume boosters are only available to the rich and well-connected. Lower middle class probably don't know anyone who works at a human-rights non-profit who can help secure an interesting internship. Most parents don't have the time to get their kids involved at the Olympic level in some obscure sport. As a matter of geography, many of the things that stand out to admissions officers at elite universities don't really exist in middle America; and the things that do, such as involvement in high-school football or FFA, are looked down upon.
There's also a matter of cultural capital. Pretty much everyone knows you should study for tests. That's a no-brainer, and accessible to all cultural groups. But figuring out what will pique the interest of some WASP in Harvard's admissions office takes special cultural knowledge. I was joking with my wife that our daughter's diversity essay should be about going to Bangladesh and getting in touch with her fundamentalist Muslim roots (my dad's grandfather was an imam). But we hang around enough rich white people to know that's not what they mean by "diversity." Instead, it would be far more helpful for her to go back to Bangladesh and fight against Bangladeshis to legalize abortion. That's what they mean by diversity.
...that actually sounds to me like it could be a great diversity essay, I don't think I agree with your interpretation.
Given that the Ivy League is only 33% non-Jewish white (compared to ~55% of the US population), and Jewish students have a ~12x better chance than non-Jewish whites at Ivy League admission [1], and are 7x over-represented compared to their US population, while whites are 0.56x under-represented, maybe it's not WASP cultural knowledge you should be targeting.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31306230
With the SAT, motivated kids are on the most level playing field in the history of civilization. And that's the best you can do without making society much more redistributive, which no one in this college admissions conversation is offering as an option anyway.
Frankly, I think hating on the SAT is either woefully misguided, or a cynical ploy to appear good without being good. And in the case of elite college admissions committees, I lean towards the latter. Am I supposed to believe that the people running these elite institutions can't think of simple stuff like this? They probably thought it all through before announcing anything to us common folk.
We often get groups like this trying to sponsor our events and buy emails of our students. It's disgusting. We also sometimes get their counselors trying to "collaborate" with us to get one of their projects published.
The competitive college application process and supporting industry of consultants is creating a generation of sociopaths. We are teaching young people that the way to get ahead in life is to lie, cheat, steal, exaggerate, and hire consultants to help you do it with class.
Over the past few months, I have spoken with some of the admissions leaders behind "top" institutions. They say that in many cases, it's hard for them to tell the difference between these applicants and "real" applicants. Most CS programs still don't even look at the GitHubs of applicants!
With AI generating content would be simpler than ever...
Just make it simple. Stick with the SAT tests. There is nothing more equitable than standardized, rigorous testing. It will not be perfectly equitable because people do differ in their abilities, but they do differ less on that front than their parents wallets do. Which is of course why it's the more privileged households that love lobbying for these bogus qualifications instead of just doing merit based tests.
Just remember a simple fact, intellect is distributed on a Bell curve, money follows a power law distribution. Whenever you're concerned that merit based processes may have unequal results, anything that can be turned into pay-to-win is going to be worse.
That's what poor people will do and it is easy to filter for degree mills. Upper middle class people will pay PhD students to add their kid name to decent papers as second author. Rich people will pay PhD post doc to put their kid as first or sole author. Billionaires will sponsor Nobel laureate lab and have kid as co-author on ground breaking paper that will get 1000+ citations in first year.
I used to think that these actually were genius kids that spent their free time pursuing scholarly pursuits and somehow befriending professors.
But what I've seen happen (multiple times) is that a lab PI convinces one of their grad-students/post-docs that "it would be a great mentorship opportunity for you to have <highshool student that just so happens to be my friend's kid> finish up that project you've been working on".
The end result is that some well-connected kid gets credit for the whole project on their applications, but the grad-student/post-doc that has already done 95% of the work just has to hand it over and can't use/publish their own experiment
All without any discussion, because it was a "peer reviewed" "paper".
Ouch.