One interesting example is the UT system. Because affirmative action was banned in Hopwood v. Texas, the UT system resorted to a program where they accept the top 10% of each high school's class into all UT schools.
It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic.
What I like about this system is that it helps a population that even the most altruistically inclined admissions office overlooks: the unprepared. I've met my fair share of students who are brilliant, hard workers but just do not play the game. Whether that's because of ignorance, fear of failure or some other factor, I do not know. They exist at every level; I've seen them for college, for tech jobs, probably for high school admissions. If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile.
> One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school.
Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford private schools.
I would assume this is the case for 95% of Americans. You must have had a different experience?
My family was not wealthy so I did not get a choice whether to "play the game". Actually, I don't even know what game you are taking about.
Consider northern Tarrant county of Texas which is the highest density school district area I have heard of.
Houses in Southlake cost about 20% more per square foot and tend to be substantially larger than all neighboring areas except Colleyville. That creates exclusivity largely due to magnified wealth that has grown up around the school.
Now that the population in the area has substantially swollen competition among the school districts has increased irrespective of wealth, though wealth remains an influential factor. When a student can live mere miles from various schools in more than two school districts, in some rare cases 4 districts, there is incentive to consider among the choices even though it’s supposed to limited by geography.
To complicate that further there are state funded charter school systems that have competitive admission requirements and ignore geography.
Yes there are also private schools as well. In many places private schools exist to provide wealthy children a superior education. That does not apply in the north Tarrant area where there are so many excellent public schools to choose from and the wealthy ones are among the best in the nation. In this area private schools exist only to provide education public schools cannot, such as religious sponsored education.
>Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford private schools.
You must never have bought a house. If you look on any real estate website, you'll find the ratings for local schools. Some towns grow or shrink on the quality of their schools. School districts are as important as cars in explaining the geometry of modern suburbia.
My city had a school choice program. Your local school was required to accept you, but out of dustrict schools were free to impose additional restrictions. Most used a lottery, but a few (at least 1 I waa considering) would look at at an applicants grade and test scores and make an admission decision based on that.
In the twenty-first century US as in thirteenth century china.
昔孟母，择邻处。
(I would claim that people, in the time of de Vos as in the time of Mencius' mother, don't vote with their feet to choose schools as much as choose their childrens' classmates, and perhaps especially the parents of their children's classmates, but I'm a cynic.)
"94027 children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a 94301, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the 95112s and 95023s."
The game I'm referring to is whatever game you need to play to gain capital, social, economic or otherwise. Whether that's applying to colleges and all of the requisite application fluff; the technical interview game or the optimal high school game. And while these games are significantly easier to play if you come from means, I know plenty of low income students who play the game far better than your elite private school types.
I’ve had plenty of discussions with people on how they plan to move from starter homes to homes in more affluent areas so their kids can mingle with richer kids and go to their schools.
It might not need to, as long as median income does. The saying of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” and “you are the company you keep” rings very true in my experience. Just being around the kids of successful parents should help in opening more doors.
"If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile."
I was surprised at the amount of people that had aced the military ASVAB test when I showed up at basic training. Not that acing that is similar to acing the SAT, but it's not easy either. Some of them were signed up for pretty menial jobs too.
Really? I took the ASVAB when I was looking for ways to fund my college education and considered doing Army Reserve. The only question I had to pause on was one about manual transmissions (I'd never driven stick before and couldn't remember how the gears were numbered on my Schwinn). The recruiter claimed to be blown away by the fact that I scored so high on the test. I was never actually given my score. I wonder if those people claiming to have aced the ASVAB were bragging with nothing to back it up. Or alternately, that some recruiters routinely tell their recruits they aced the test to help seal the deal.
They weren't claiming. Your scores are all posted on the wall in basic training.
I walked the dorms and saw ~5 aces or very near aces out of maybe 200ish total people's scores.
It's just somewhat odd because starting out as an E1 isn't terribly lucrative. It doesn't surprise me that 5 of 200 do that well. It surprises me that 5 of 200 that do so well actually enlist.
I'm curious how the Montgomery GI Bill changes that calculus.
My distant understanding is that a not-insignificant number of people join the military because this will give them a full ride in college. They can't make much more than the Army pays with a high school diploma, and they can't afford college without either crippling debt or something like the GI Bill.
But I don't have any facts here, just going off what an old friend told me about how he ended up in Iraq in the first place.
Not just the GI Bill, but the benefits in general are a huge motivator. Where else can an 18 year old newlywed with a baby be assured that they can provide for their family?
To get back to your point on the MGIB - these days the Post-9/11 GI Bill is where it's at. With the Post-9/11, a veteran can actually have public university tuition paid, plus a books stipend, plus a housing allowance (meaning they can actually afford to live in addition to finishing school). I didn't enlist for the GI Bill, but when I got out and realized the incredible opportunity I had, I just couldn't turn it down.
Sure. It's just those scores (or the implied intelligence) could probably get you into programs like the one where the Navy pays you a stipend while at college, and pays for college...before you join the military, as an officer. The other branches have similar programs.
There's quite a lot of crap to go through before you get to use that GI bill money :)
That lot of crap was why I didn't follow through on enlisting—I was looking for funding for the next semester which I had hoped enlisting in the army reserve would do, but it turned out it would be at least six months before I saw any college benefits and after six months, I could do just as well on my own.
It's just as well because had I done this, I would have been in the reserve for the first gulf war and been sent to Iraq, something that I would have had no desire to do (in general, army reserve would have been a very poor fit for me).
In the military as bottom of the rung enlisted people, yes. I feel okay saying that, since I was there, and I was one. I had, er, blown some earlier opportunities. It's not an easy life for the first couple of years, and the pay is terrible at first.
> In the military as bottom of the rung enlisted people, yes.
Some people just want to get stuck into the work and tactics rather than all the fuss of being an officer! Being a private soldier in many units can be an extremely challenging and rewarding experience. Yes the pay isn't great for people with other opportunities, but money isn't everything in life.
I know many people who could easily commission but want to stay operators because that's what they enjoy.
> I mean bottom of the rung, E1. You can do 2 years of community college and enter a couple of ranks higher.
But...you can't. At least, not that would show up at Basic. The higher grade you get for sufficient vo/tech or collegiate study prior to enlistment is applied after graduating from Basic. AFAIK,that's true even for the programs where you enlist with guaranteed OCS after Basic, you still are an E-1 when you go to Basic though you are administratively promoted to E-5 at OCS.
Right, and all the programs I referred to are also guaranteed promotion after Basic as well. But you'll still be an E-1 in Basic and so if you are looking at some outstanding scores on something posted for E-1s in Basic, well, it's possible those E-1s are people who enlisted with a guarantee of higher grade on successful completion of Basic, not starting at the bottom except insofar as everyone enlisting starts at the bottom in Basic.
Apparently the navy considers scouting to be roughly equivalent to an AA.
"Scouting
Provide evidence of successful completion of Eagle Scout or the Girl Scout Gold Award requirements and you are entitled to be enlisted in pay-grade E-3."
Sure, but the statement seemed to allude that the incentive was gaining rank, not taking the easiest route.
>You can do 2 years of community college and enter a couple of ranks higher.
Point being, if your goal is to maximize rank the fastest, it doesn't make sense to go to community college for two years. If two people consider enlisting at the same time but one defers to community college, that deferment will likely mean they are lower rank/seniority than the person who joined without any additional school.[1] Both will still have the same enlistment term, but the non-deferring person would be considered senior because they also have more time in service and time in grade.
If the intent is to go to school to qualify for a commission, that's a different matter.
[1] e.g., Person1 joins immediately, Person2 joins two years after community college. Person1 is at least an E3 in most cases and likely and E4 (rare cases E5) plus two years time in service and more time in grade when Person2 joins. Person2 comes in at an E3 with zero days time in service/time in grade. (Time in service/grade are applicable to gaining the next rank on a scoring system). Meaning Person1 is more competitive for the next rank, with all other things equal
5/200 is 97th percentile, roughly speaking. But I would guess that acing the test is something that general population would be able to do at 80th percentile, maybe 90th (although I'm a bad judge of such things and a quick google search reveals nothing elucidating).
> It surprises me that 5 of 200 that do so well actually enlist.
I’m generalizing here, but: No matter what their score was (high or low), most people are going to take the ASVAB because they want to join the military and reap the benefits of it (i.e. TRICARE, GI bill). We can’t forget that military granted health insurance covers around 3-4% of the total insured (US Census, 2019, p.3)[1]. It is also a heavily road traveled road out of poverty for many POC and low-income students. There’s a reason you see more military recruiters in counties, states, and especially schools which have a overall lower income level. But we must also remember we do not know where their true interests lie. Or if they’d be able to — or even want to — handle efficiently the responsibility of being in a higher education setting as opposed to the more structural hierarchy of the military.
However, this does not take away from the fact that some of those 5 people may have a certain given ability to excel in a field that only the military provides. They may want to take that skill all the way to an Officer position instead of working up a corporate ladder. Say geography for example. Someone may have an educational knack for it and perhaps they change their military career goals toward something more technical (cyber defense, intel) instead of labor intensive (infantry). Either of these career choices would only be possible in a military setting. (Lucrative military contractor and paid mercenary jobs are moot points for this discussion.)
In the end, I do not think the ASVAB should be looked at as a moment of enlightenment the same way the SAT would be. They are serving two different purposes and a majority of people sitting in the recruiters office already have their mind made up; it’s now just a matter of figuring out which base you’re attending for training and how long it’ll last.
I think you’re missing a major point: Not everybody wants to go to college. Yes there are ROTC programs and you’ll be commissioned as an officer after 4 years BUT you still have to attend school.
If someone does not want to attend higher ed, telling them about a stipend and quick ranking will fall on deaf ears. They’re sitting in the recruiters office to find an escape from their current situation and reality. I’d wager most kids do not want to be told “stay in this town for 4 more years and then it’ll be better. Trust me.”
They want to get out NOW and start a new life and a new career. Not be told what they want to do is wrong.
Those programs were one example. There are other paths, like trade schools, journeyman programs, etc. I'm not missing the point, I talked to some of them. They mostly just didn't know what else to do.
Basically all of it to confirm the notion (in the comment I replied to) that there is talent to be scooped up. Don't let a military recruiter be the only person that offers them something.
Isn’t the United States still heavily segregated???
Take a look at the data on Milwaukee, Detroit and Chicago for example.
As Clarence Thomas has mentioned often “affirmative action” just covers up larger injustices like underfunded public schools and housing discrimination.
In a lot of states, we have Democratic big cities and Republican towns with a Republican state legislature.
Guess which areas in the state get the most funding for their schools —- it’s NOT the cities with the most people per square mile.
> It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic.
In practice in Texas when I saw this the effect was very limited, because the best classes were largely full of the would-normally-be-in-other-schools magnet students, and didn't have a ton of uptake from the students in that school's regular geographic region. And then they gave bonus GPA points for taking those classes, so cracking the top 10% as a non-magnet-program student was harder still.
Having the classes available was certainly helpful for a small number of students who took them who may not have had access to them otherwise, and concentrating the magnet programs let the district offer more a few more advanced classes than they might have otherwise, but it also somewhat negated any opportunity-spreading effects of the 10% rule.
Any "top nn%" rule asks for another form of toxic gaming of the system.
At least back around the turn of the century, in Arizona, the state universities gave a full tuition waiver for the top 25 or 33% of the graduating class. (Not sure if they still do) This seems at its face to be a very inclusive goal-- you'd make the program accessible to students regardless of finances.
But some schools were so aggressive on the AP and other 'weighted' programmes (A=5.0, B=4.0, etc.), that the valedictorian would have something like a 4.6 GPA, and even a standard 4.0 might not clear the top 25%. It would not be enough just to be an excellent student, you had to explicitly load up on weighted courses-- and of course, there were no weighted fine arts or vocational courses.
This leads to a bunch of toxic outcomes. A straight A student would rank below someone with an A/B record, because she chose the right courses to take. There was pressure to choose the courses which bumped the GPA as opposed to the ones which fit interests or potential commercial utility, which I suspect would lead to resource starvation and classes cancelled due to undersubscription.
That's not a problem with the admission system, that's a problem with the scholarship being underfunded. If 33% is missing people, go to 50%. This idea that college admissions should be competitive is absolutely toxic
> This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic.
One of the common complaints higher performing students have is that they are dispersed in their classes and very bored as the teacher teaches to the lowest common denominator. Now, that is classrooms, not schools, but you have schools that try to accommodate gifted students in their own tracks and...why are they even bothering putting them in the same schools?
This is playing out at a massive scale with virtual learning. Large amounts of kids in the gifted program and generally “smart” kids have been pulled a week in. there is little value in keeping them together with kids below their academic level in this environment since all the social aspects are gone.
UT Austin is allowed to accept only the top 6%. It also creates weird incentives for students. A friend of mine works in the front office of a local high school and she knows a lot of students who have dropped electives such as band because it lowers their grade point. In Austin area schools AP courses are weighted on a 6.0 scale which makes the problem worse if you want broaden your education and take non-weighted classes.
Yeah this is a serious defect in the high school system. Other than our valedictorian with an Eidadic memory got too marks in all classes, the rest of us who did band, a non honors course, all 4 years suffered from not getting a the weighted boost and ended up ranked a few places lower than our peers who got the same 1 or 2 Bs but took honors theatre or honors debate even if they actually liked band or track team better.
The similar issue repeats itself in college where employers lkke McKinsey and Goldman prefilter for the 3.8+ gpa kids as a proxy for intellect/hard work. But this discourages the career minded students from going for the hardest classes with tough but intellectually stimulating professors and comes again down to who can figure out how to best cherry pick for easy grades.
That's the reason I like having some classes as pass or fail. It really encourages students to take some classes that are out of their comfort zone and try something different. Else they'll stick to the optimal path and might miss out on some things they might have been good at.
>getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools
I think there's also a lot of value in giving the local students some peers that are more serious about education too. Ideally every school should offer a non-distracting environment for motivated students
It used to be the case (when I was in High School) that 10% meant ticket to UT Austin, in fact a huge fraction of students at UT Austin were 10% students.
I found this policy excellent, it meant I had a bunch of colleagues from really small towns with no resources and this was clearly life changing for those attending college.
It felt like everything college is supposed to be (even if imperfect).
A lot do make it in, but some of the programs are limited in how many they can take. Which sucks, because some of the alternatives don't offer much of a campus experience...like UT Arlington.
This is also how the UC system works: the top 9% (IIRC) students are eligible for guaranteed admission, but they are not necessarily admitted to the campus or program of their choice, so you might not get to go to eg Berkeley.
Do they take into account what you intend to major in? Not all UC campuses offer all degrees. If you are in that 9% and want to major in, say, mathematics, will they try to make sure that you get into one of the campuses that offers that?
Why are there any majors that are only offered at a single school? That seems like a much bigger problem than people being able to pick which school they want to go to.
You could have a college major in any possible area of academic inquiry, which means the number of potential college majors is unlimited. Each school can only have so many faculty and they have to balance various factors when deciding who to hire. More resources dedicated to offering new majors might mean less resources going to popular majors that are overenrolled.
Also, the colleges within UT can have much more stringent requirements. You're not getting into the engineering or business colleges with a mediocre background.
So, as outcomes for kids are hugely affected by the school they go to, you'd like to take kids OUT of schools where they're expected to do really well and put them into schools where they probably are not going to, in the hope they slightly improve grades for other students. I'm sorry, but I really don't think you've thought this through.
I'm not refuting anything! What I'm saying is if you claim to know how to change and improve education you better have some evidence to support your claim. As to why I feel like I can comment..my father has been an education consultant for the past 30 years, before that he was a teacher, my sister is a teacher and so was my mum. What you're espousing is an ideological approach that you'd like to be true. Why not claim its true, I mean, you're smart right, why would you need evidence to backup what you're saying?
I think an interesting result of this has increased the snobbishness/elitism of UT Grads. Older UT Alums (prior to the 10% rule) are pretty chill people, but the newer ones are universally entitled jerks.
A bunch of commenters here have gotten fixated on two questions: (a) "meritocracy" and what it means or should mean and (b) whether the value of top colleges derives mainly from being exclusive.
I think an interesting / illustrative case is the AMA as the credentialing authority for medical schools. An association of people in the profession, who have a clear interest in the supply of doctors being low, has a clear lever by which to restrain the future supply of doctors. Independent of which specific people get in and how, for the country overall, most of us would probably be better off if more people got into med school, if there were more med schools, and there were just more doctors working a decade from now. The important question isn't just who should get the seat, but which policy choice gives us a better health care system.
I'm guessing the same is true for other areas, but it's just less clear. Rather than asking "who gets to go to the best schools", more interesting is "what policies at the best schools give us a country we want to live in a generation from now?" or "what choice yields the greatest benefit, not just to the student, but to society?"
And if schools don't want to make choices from that perspective, if they want to operate like luxury brands whose goods are valued mostly because they're rare ... then maybe they shouldn't get tax exemptions around their endowments, or public funds, or the respect and esteem of a population that thinks they serve some higher, refined purpose.
The AMA doesn't restrict the number of people in medical school, you're thinking of residency slots, and they don't restrict that either. They're in favor of expanding the number of residencies available since everyone knows there is a shortage of doctors. The restriction comes from funding since it's all Federal dollars to pay for the training.
Congress, and more specifically right now, the Republican Senate is the only thing holding up funding tens of thousands of more slots (the bills are cosponsored by ~130 congresspeople, of which 100+ are Democrats and by 17 Senators, of which 15 are Democrats)
> The AMA doesn't restrict the number of people in medical school, you're thinking of residency slots, and they don't restrict that either.
There's a very simple solution to this problem that requires nothing other than the stroke of a pen: allow residents from OECD nations to practice medicine in the US.
There's nothing magical about an American residency. Countries like France, Britain, Israel, Korea, New Zealand, Czechia, Costa Rica, Chile, and Portugal have better health outcomes than the US. Obviously there's nothing deficient about how doctors are being trained in Prague or Santiago or Seoul.
Yet American doctors have by far the highest compensation of any country in the world. Demand meet supply. Let's open up our borders and let doctors from qualified countries come here to practice. Many would flood our shores for significantly higher wages. We'd solve the doctor shortage over night.
Of course the AMA absolutely knows this. That's why they vehemently lobby against any change to the residency requirement. The AMA is a self-interest political lobby, just like any other interest group. They look out for the interest of doctors at the expense of patients. The issue about residency expansion being blocked is just a red herring. There's no reason the US can't outsource its residency training to other, much lower wage countries that are already producing superior physicians.
Only problem is American medical students take on massive student loans while those in other countries often have their tuition subsidized by their governments. Instead of paying for medical education via taxes, we pay via employers, insurance premiums, deductibles and Medicare taxes.
My mistake. After reading your response, I tried to go back and find where I had originally heard that the AMA contributed to a bottleneck at the med school level. While it is true that the AMA (one side of the LCME partnership) has a role direct role in accreditation of medical schools (which does restrict the number of medical students, albeit not at the level of stipulating a number of seats), it does seem like residencies are the more important bottleneck.
However, a meaningful fraction of those residencies are filled by people (including Americans) who did medical school overseas. I read this as suggesting that there are still not enough seats in American med schools, but that foreign institutions have stepped up to provide that training.
It's extremely expensive to pay to train residents, so somebody needs to pay for it.. We incentivize 'teaching hospitals' to use their most expensive and valuable employees spending time as mentors to train the next generation of physicians by paying those hospitals to host residents.
If the parent's comment is true, I wouldn't trust the AMA to market itself honestly.
Ditto for legislative solutions. There's too much conflict of interest, susceptibility to lobbying, non-representation of marginalized groups or those who would be doctors but are not because of troubling practices, etc.
From Mises.org[0]
To accomplish the twin goals of artificially elevated incomes and worship by patients, AMA formulated a two-pronged strategy for the labor market for physicians. First, use the coercive power of the state to limit the practices of physician competitors such as homeopaths, pharmacists, midwives, nurses, and later, chiropractors. Second, significantly restrict entrance to the profession by restricting the number of approved medical schools in operation and thus the number of students admitted to those approved schools yearly.
AMA created its Council on Medical Education in 1904 with the goal of shutting down more than half of all medical schools in existence. (This is the Council having its 100th anniversary celebrated in Chicago this weekend.) In six years the Council managed to close down 35 schools and its secretary N.P. Colwell engineered what came to be known as the Flexner Report of 1910. The Report was supposedly written by Abraham Flexner, the former owner of a bankrupt prep school who was neither a doctor nor a recognized authority on medical education. Years later Flexner admitted that he knew little about medicine or how to differentiate between different qualities of medical education. Regardless, state medical boards used the Report as a basis for closing 25 medical schools in three years and reducing the number of students by 50% at remaining schools.
The article is thoroughly footnoted. One might take exception with specifics, but it seems hard to argue that the above is not approximately correct.
Edit: I see the downvotes, but don't see the justification. I know Mises is an often-unpopular resources, but the above article is well-researched. If there are problems with the line of reasoning, I'd love to hear your perspective on it.
Because your excerpt starts with "To accomplish the twin goals of artificially elevated incomes and worship by patients."
The thoroughly footnote supporting the latter part of that sentence is supposedly comes from something written by The Massachusetts Medical Society, but actually comes from a speech written by a single physician over half a century before the rise of the AMA's Council on Medical Education. And it does not say that mankind "should be 'looked upon by the mass of mankind with a veneration almost superstitious.', as is stated. It doesn't even get the year of publication of the quote right.
Packing an article with footnotes doesn't mean a damn thing.
Other footnotes include such thorough scholarship as this one time an unnamed Chemistry instructor told me off the record that white men have a harder time getting into med school with mediocre scores than black women do, and editorialized quotes from sources where neither a long enough quote, or enough information on the source is provided to lookup the full quote.
Though I can believe there being a preference toward reducing competition, their argument is weakened by including homeopaths as maligned groups. Homeopaths are not competitors with physicians, as that would imply that homeopaths provide medical treatment. At best, homeopaths provide a placebo. At worst, they actively poison customers (e.g. belladonna teething tablets) and prevent them from seeking out actual medical care.
Whether homeopathy works (it doesn't) doesn't have a huge amount of bearing on whether homeopaths compete in the market with physicians (they do), because their customers are seeking the same thing.
I believe the article addresses approximately your point:
AMA's initial drive to increase physician incomes was motivated by increasing competition from homeopaths (AMA allopaths use treatments--usually synthetic--that produce effects different from the diseases being treated while homeopaths use treatments--usually natural--that produce effects similar to those of the disease being treated).
[...]
Apart from reversing rapidly declining incomes, allopaths also wanted to rescue their public reputations, which quite reasonably suffered given their proficiency in killing patients through such crude practices as bloodletting ("exsanguination") or mercury injections (poisoning).
You're right - homeopaths were competitive with allopaths.
But in the late 1800s (when most of the doctors/homeopaths grew up) the state-of-the-art physician was not much better (and perhaps often far worse) than what you are judging homeopaths.
If a college accepts students taking government-subsidised loans, or otherwise receives any federal funding, it should not be permitted to consider legacy [1] or institutional advancement for admissions.
I mean, the basic idea behind an elite school is you have:
* A community of rich folks who get to look smart-by-association
* A community of smart folks who get networked into the power networks
All the decision-makers would lose out on this. Why would this even fly? George Bush Jr went to Yale and Harvard. He looked smart. And, a bunch of people were friends with the President. Folks like him make the laws.
Yeah this is really funny to me. Articles like this fantasize about being able to apply some engineering solution to a problem as if just having any good idea is sufficient to force some third party to implement it. They complete ignore the incentive system the thing lives in so as to make their analysis a total waste of time.
The fact that GWB went to Yale made it possible for him to become President.
Elite schools make it easier for people who have money (but aren’t too academically inclined) to get into positions of political power by building credentials and connecting with a community of smart people.
Isn't that exactly what I wrote? The whole point of elite schools is to give rich people appearance of intelligence by association.
If you take 2000 valedictorians and 500 rich douchebags, have the 500 rich douchebags pay to educate the whole lot, and everyone comes out with a common brand stamp, who benefits?
Answer: Everyone involved!
Taking away federal funding (as if that were politically possible) would slow it down a little bit, but the rich douchebags are really, really rich. They'll just pay a little bit more. I don't know how you're going to stop that without a totalitarian state.
What about the rest of us? Did we benefit that George Bush (who claimed never to read a book at Yale) got the certification of an elite degree? What you are saying is the equivalent of saying everyone in the mafia benefited by being part of the mafia.
And btw before anyone talks about how Yale (or any other elite school) is private and can make their own decisions - no - they receive MASSIVE amounts of government funding. Princeton receives more per capita government funds than Rutgers.
The point he's making is that if the funding is removed, Princeton or Yale would no longer need to put up the façade.
So the only thing that would matter is whether or not the Bush-type families of the US benefit from the system that is in place. The commenter is positing that the answer is "Yes". I agree with that assessment.
The facade is central to the business model. If the only people going to elite schools were rich and politically-connected:
(1) It would look bad for everyone involved.
(2) The schools would lose their prestige.
Right now, if I want a good lawyer, I look to Yale, followed by Harvard/Stanford/Chicago. I have a 70% chance of getting a brilliant lawyer, and a 30% chance of getting a rich douchebag. For law firms, it doesn't actually matter too much, since reputation is mostly circular.
If I want a good engineer, I look to MIT/Stanford/Caltech. I have a 80% chance of getting a good engineer, and a 20% chance of getting a rich douchebag. That's not a guaranteed hire, but it gets you in the door. Hopefully, my interview will screen out the rich douchebags, but it doesn't always. That model is breaking down a little bit, since people are starting to notice that the typical engineering applicant from e.g. Georgia Tech, Northeastern, or similar is better than MIT/Stanford/Caltech+++.
Upside to rich douchebags: They're past the first round of all hiring processes. Between university brand and network, their kids can always find at least upper middle class jobs. In a best case, they can go on to be president! Or if they're running a company, they don't look obviously nepotistic.
+++ It's worth noting there are sample biases here. Most qualified MIT/Stanford/Caltech graduates can find jobs without going through proletarian hiring processes, so the people who do actually apply for jobs through my web site are prefiltered.
The schools won't lose that prestige, however, because the majority of the kids they admit are academically gifted. If, say, 30% of a class are legacies, that means they pick and choose 70% of the class from academically gifted kids who are verified to be, "Our kind of people". (With all the exclusionary connotations of that phrase.)
What we're talking about is the connection, during formative years, of the academically gifted to the ultra wealthy and ultra powerful. The idea that this would result in less prestige is fanciful in the extreme.
The other side of the argument is that if the facade is not there, if they only admit rich people, the university will lose its reputation and become irrelevant overnight.
The thing that gives elite universities their reputation both their academic reputation and the elites that attend them. If they lose the academic reputation, the unis become irrelevant and might as well be a party house for rich people; no one will care except tabloids. If they lose the elites, the universities will still be prestigious universities.
So to spell it out, what I’m saying is that rich people attending elite universities are not important for elite universities. It mainly benefits rich people.
Most of the financial aid given out by these schools isn’t federal aid. They even give full rides to international students who aren’t eligible for federal at all, and middle-class kids whose families have too much income to be eligible. This aid is funded by the endowment which is donations from rich people.
I think when people say Princeton receives a lot of federal money, they are talking about research grants, and possibly the effective subsidy that comes from the tax deductible status of donations from rich people. Each of these adds up to a lot more money than the Pell grants.
If you take away the rich people, the school won’t be able to afford to operate this way.
> The other side of the argument is that if the facade is not there, if they only admit rich people…
I believe the point was that these schools don't need to accept subsidized student loans or other forms of federal funding. That doesn't mean only admitting rich people; they have enough resources to offer student aid to bring in the academic overachievers on their own, thus maintaining their reputation without federal help.
About 2/5 of the Fed's money goes to research, and about 3/5 goes to "overhead."
"Overhead" then funds $200 million buildings, million dollar salaries, yacht clubs, financial ponzi schemes, press/legal/branding departments, and what not.
It's not significantly more people. The US has 5000 universities and colleges, and perhaps a dozen really elite schools, depending on where you draw the line. Those schools have more money. No one else does.
And only some of that money comes from donations. Much of it are your taxpayer dollars at work. The direct way is to donate money. The indirect way is to swing government funds.
Ok, well it is more people than the amount of spots that they take up.
> Those schools have more money. No one else does.
Ok, so if an elite person takes up one spot, but the extra money allows 2 more spots to open up, then that is a net increase in total number of slots. So that is still a benefit to the extra people who can go to that college.
But maybe if education was actually about pursuit of knowledge rather than simply networking to maximize your capitalist potential, we would end up with a more educated populace.
Subsidizing college education ultimately opens up a spot in higher education for everyone.
It's short-sighted to view the wealthy people manipulating our institutions with their money as our providers. They literally paid for the opportunity for people to view them that way.
This is true. Taking away public funding is what a lot of people at some of these schools want. It's an opportunity to completely eliminate the riff-raff.
Even in my own state, the flagship university was threatened with a cut off of public funding under the previous governor. It was a bit of an open secret that internally to the university, a large number of people wanted the funding to be cut. This would mean they'd no longer need to carry the financial burden of all the automatic admits from within the state.
You make it sound like it’s preordained that people like Bush make the laws and smart people should be grateful that they get to attend elite universities to network with the heirs presumptive of future presidencies.
In reality, it’s the rich that benefit by getting connections to a network of future political operatives, academics, media people that allow them to use their wealth in order to advance their political interests.
You're seeming to miss that it's a two-way street. All of those folks also want to be connected to the rich so that they can potentially get funding for whatever their idea/project is and get access to networks of the wealthy. These elite institutions provide an interconnection point between two different networks, the networks of the wealthy and the networks of the highly intelligent.
It is pretty much pre-ordained that those are intelligent and those who are rich will find ways to network with one another so that both of their causes are advanced. For the highly intelligent that might be getting funding for a startup idea. For the rich that might be having access to network effects to cement their political power base.
It's not that the current system is inevitable, it's that any deviations from the current system which may be possible are relatively minute when it comes to this particular facet. All of human history has told us so.
Wouldn't the obvious fix for this be to reduce the amount of power that is available to people in this way? In other words, reducing the amount of power that we give to institutions (like government) whose membership is largely determined by these factors, instead of by people having to produce actual results in the real world?
I bet it wouldn't really have hurt GWB to have gone to UT-Austin instead. Especially if all the other rich kids stopped getting accepted (so he wouldn't stand out).
He got jobs and power because his daddy was President. Not because he went to Yale.
I think these schools think its the opposite. They'd rather have someone who already has power within their network.
Why? I think legacy helps with the culture of a school. Legacy shouldn't get you in, but it should be part of the overall intention of class composition. If some 20% of people are good enough and have a family connection, I think it makes the institution stronger.
What? That story had nothing to do with legacy. Legacy isn't about ultra rich people. It's about being able to send your kids to the same school you went to.
Picking the top applicants backfires because people game it.
For example, consider Students A and B who're mostly identical except Student A likes to binge on Wikipedia while Student B spends every night doing SAT practice problems. Colleges that select only the top applicants get the B's of the world, who optimize their observables, while the A's seem somewhat less competitive on paper.
If you change the rules -- like you start focusing on clubs, volunteering, or even just skipping the Top-1% -- the gamers'll adjust their strategies, out-performing the non-gamers who develop actual talents. The top colleges end up getting flooded by gamers who're focused on looking good.
The pragmatic solution proposed in this article is to randomly select "good enough" applicants. This allows colleges to take in the top-performing non-gamers who have a wealth of actual skills (rather than gaming hacks) while also reducing the incentive for gamers to waste their time gaming the system.
right but if you’re looking for people who will succeed in college (or the corporate world)
wouldn’t you be looking for people who can achieve based on specified rules and fun to within a system, instead of undisciplined people who can’t do that but may naturally be intellectually curious?
the first makes a terrific employee, the second might not put in hard work for stuffthey don’t find interesting or may leave altogether
If you've got a simple, mechanical job that a trained monkey could do if monkeys were more intelligent, then, definitely, you'd want folks who'll slavishly adhere to whatever task is assigned -- the folks who'll spend all night doing SAT prep problems would be perfect hires.
But if you want to train innovators who'll actually advance their fields -- whether we're talking mathematicians, scientists, engineers, doctors, or business leaders -- then you'll want the folks who'll pursue such things on their own initiative along with the talents they've developed due to that intrinsic motivation.
Elite non-innovators can have their place. In science/engineering/math, they won't be leaders, but they can still be effective researchers with strong publication records, reliably churning out decent-quality papers. In medicine, they can be great practicing doctors. In business, they'd be reliable middle-management types.
Still, it'd be weird for a top institution to only have middle-management types.
Pretty much every admission system I have seen can be gamed in some way.
Standardized testing is probably the worst offender here, since while the absolute equalizer on paper (everyone gets the same test!) it really rewards over-fitting and learning how to perform well on one type of exam.
It's probably closer to that today than most would care to publicly admit. Oh, they don't roll a dice but they mostly have some sort of academic cutoff and then decide on admissions from the remaining pool by lots of factors aiming for a diverse student body across many somewhat arbitrary dimensions. A handful may be slam-dunks above a certain floor (star athlete, parents donated a building, did some amazing humanitarian project in high school). But for the most part, there is a lot of randomness among the admissions of solidly good-enough students.
Top colleges should stop treating admissions like a limited release beer - driving up prices with intentional shortages - and build some damn classrooms.
(1) Which has no impact on student learning (what nominally is what the undergrads are there for)
(2) And where there's a lot more academic malpractice at the elites. Most people don't get to be an MIT professor without cheating at least a little bit to get that extra edge.
Quality of faculty, which IS important, is identical until you get into really lower tiers.
> the academic quality of the average student
Indeed. So the question is to you want to segregate or integrate? Would the world be better off with all the smart kids and rich kids at one institution, and everyone else at another, or with everyone together? Remember at universities, kids can take different classes, so a freshman can take grad-level courses if they're so inclined.
Elite schools give you elite brand stamps and elite networks coming out. That's their key value-add. And it's totally worth it.
> class sizes
Ummm... No. Student:faculty ratios, usually. But a 4:1 faculty ratio with a 1:1 teaching load versus an 8:1 faculty ratio with a 2:2 teaching load leads to the same class size.
For the most part, elite schools don't have the best teaching. The best teaching happens at the more teaching-focused schools, unsurprisingly (which isn't the same as "small liberal arts..." which are mostly horrible).
Getting enough teaching staff and laboratory space is expensive and exponentially harder to manage. Plus you will need support such as cheap mass housing. Then on top of that, big mass transport.
It's not insurmountable, and quite a lot a chicken and egg problem.
The most important part is, what do you do with drop outs? Or with people who try and cannot find fit?
How do you handle people who have to quit for personal or family reasons, who suddenly now are concentrated on one place near the university?
Absolutely. Because we want our doctors and engineers to be just "good enough", none of this elitism for us!
I'm sure they'll still cure cancer and get us to Mars, right?
And the truly elite who miss out by random chance ... that doesn't matter because justice doesn't require us to recognise and appropriately reward genius.
In fact, screw those priviliged geniuses, they're only first in line because they won a genetic lottery right?
i think the point the article was trying to make is that good enough is a much more quantifiable metric and randomization after that is better at minimizing bias from those who select who is "special." I think of it more like, everyone with a 1500 sat go into a hat, and we pick 20 randomly, rather than lets put everyone with a sat score of 1000 in a hat because that is "good enough."
It's not obvious that the current process does better than chance at detecting genius, though - at the margin, the formal and informal tests used for admissions are far better predictors of your parents' tax bracket than of your own inherent ability.
I upvoted you, but it is true that for most graduates, a degree is just a ticket to the upper middle class where they will mostly do meetings, email, and office documents.
Sadly, this is true for a lot of engineering jobs too.
That's true. But, bluntly, and speaking as a member, we don't matter anywhere near as much as the absolute best.
The members of the "upper middle class ticket" group might as well be selected by ballot from the intellectually qualified.
But I'd never suggest that if it in any way imperiled the idenfitifcation and support of the very best and brightest. Which, AFAICT, is exactly what this proposal would do.
Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline.
"Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."
Social justice and "fairness" is rarely one of the main goals of a meritocracy. The main goal of a meritocracy is peak performance. NFL teams select the "best" quarter-backs not because it's most fair, but because it will produce the most wins. Universities grant tenure to the most productive professors, because that will enhance the University's reputation. Hospitals hire the best doctors, because they can save the most lives. A society should delegate its most important responsibilities to its smartest/most-knowledgable members, because they can best lead society through worldly challenges.
Which is not to say that Social Justice isn't important. It is vital. But you don't get to it by hiring the wrong people in the wrong roles. A meritocracy excels at producing wealth - Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, Unemployment Insurance, better Public Schooling... these are the kind of Social Justice programs that best distribute the wealth back to society.
When the benefits of a society that's lead well bubble up to a small elite, why should anyone else give a shit about how well-optimized the operations of society are?
To put it more directly - why should someone on the floor staff of Wal-Mart care about how optimally Wal-Mart is ran? They get paid by the hour, they don't own any stock in the company - and if it collapses, they'd just find another crappy job in another crappy retailer that pays minimum wage.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the optimizations of society are directed at 'optimizing' the share of the pie that the small elite receives.
In a well-functioning society, they should care because taxation of the small elite disproportionately funds the social safety net that means that, even though they mop a Wal-Mart, they'll get chemotherapy if they have cancer, and won't immediately become homeless when Wal-Mart deploys a floor-mopping robot and lays them off.
We don't have that, or, we don't have all of that. But we could. And historically, simply confiscating the wealth of the elite, or just stacking their headless bodies in mass graves, doesn't do great things for the prosperity of the average citizen.
Most signifiers of merit, outside of academics (I'd argue even including academics), require a certain amount of privilege. You can't volunteer or take piano lessons or play sports seriously if you have to help out around the house because you're living in a single parent household where the parent has to hold two jobs to make ends meet.
The concrete example I often give is that as a conference organizer we decide to be a meritocracy. Great! As a fair meritocracy, all else being equal between speakers a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done. Experience should count right? So let's look at it in detail. Fred and Sarah both submit great talk proposals. But Fred has done ten talks and Sarah has done nine, so he gets the slot. Looking back at Fred's talk history in detail we learn that one of the conferences has a slight bias towards white men they don't even know about, and another is a committee of mostly men who agree that male speakers are just better.
By choosing Fred, you just amplified sexism. And possibly even the less qualified person (assuming all of Sarah's prior talks were thanks to a fair selection process). A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.
Now imagine how much this happens over a lifetime if you live in a racist and / or sexist society. This is why a healthy amount of randomness is at the very least an interesting idea, and perhaps even has... merit.
> A true meritocracy can't really exist unless you have knowledge of all prior decisions, which is impossible.
This is a good point but your argumentation isn't really convincing. Here's a simple fix for your scenario: only use talks in your circuit as tie breaker. The other concern("possibly even the less qualified person") is an impossibility given your assumptions("all else being equal between speakers"). If you have a perfect meritocracy, and only use your own tests to measure merit, then you would maintain it.
Of course, as you said, achieving perfect meritocracy is impossible, which means we should always consider how to work around the flaws in our existing approach. I like the idea of randomization, but you have to consider that it has its own flaws - drawing from a small pool wouldnot have the desired diversifying effect, but drawing from a too large pool might introduce too many students that are not at the same academic level, with all the problems that brings. In a sense, random choice has similar problems of not being able to achieve "perfection" as meritocracy, and they would need to be balanced together.
To me, all of this concern over the admissions process of the top tier schools tells me that there's a growing need for an even more elite tier of schools. Those schools will undoubtedly have a diversity problem, but it does not sit right with me to limit the ceiling for the most academically gifted students just because most of them come from a privileged background. What this tends to do is exacerbate the problem, as the more wealthy can afford more expensive, privately tailored programs to their kids - the brilliant underprivileged kids will not have this opportunity. Just like we'll never achieve perfect meritocracy, we'll never eliminate privilege - our pursuit of equality should be tempered by the same concerns of unintended, negative consequences due to our imperfect approach.
Do they actually anymore? Aren't many male and white dominated organizations actively trying to be biased the other way?
When I studied engineering, my university had a "women in engineering" club which did a recruitment evening and I went along. When I talked to an employer, they told me "this is really for women, you should go to the general one instead". From what I understand, that kind of bias is widespread in America too. Where is this male and white preference happening?
I know many fields are dominated by white men but that fact alone doesn't show that it's because of systemic bias. Wasn't that stuff mostly stopped in the 1960's which is before anyone working today got started?
Just the other day there was a story on HN about an AI fighter pilot beating a real pilot in a simulation. But the company that did it was given special priority for government work because it was owned by a black person! A white owned company doing the same thing might not have got that contract.
We live in a society where tech conference organisers, far from being biased in favor of white men, are actually desperate to shield themselves from accusations of anti-female/poc bias. Derive from that what you will.
Correct. Meritocracy, when iterated over time with the effects of previous iterations brought forward, can have unintended and counter-intuitive consequences.
You're conflating the principle and the implementation. Meritocracy is good in principle, but your specific metric is bogus. Feel free to criticize the implementation/metric, but that's not a valid criticism of the underlying principle.
As an analogy, safe driving is a good principle. Assessing the safety of a driver by past behaviour ("this person hasn't crashed in a while") is decent but biased metric. E.g. "drunkenness" might be a better metric. But the choice of metric doesn't (in)validate the underlying principle.
To be fair, "it's impossible to implement this principle, and every attempt inevitably backfires" is, if actually true, a pretty damning criticism of a underlying principle in its capacity as something you'd actually want to implement.
A has a solid proposal and they're a known good quantity on the "speaker circuit"
B is a newcomer and their proposal looks really interesting too--maybe even more so--but we don't know them so maybe A is the safer choice
(I'd argue that this is the way that a lot of conferences have historically operated and many still do to some degree--which is OK to a point. You don't want to exclude traditional crowd-pleasers.)
But maybe if A's proposal is just solid, it wouldn't hurt to reach out to B for some additional information and to offer mentoring rather than just go with the safe easy choice.
Sure, but to the extent that you're going with the safe easy choice, you're not deciding based on merit. There are cases where that makes sense, but the ones where it doesn't aren't a problem with meritocracy; they're a problem with giving up on meritocracy.
It's easy enough to use my thought experiment to make it a meritocracy. We watch their latest talks. Fred is a better speaker. Thanks to more experience because he has done more talks. Thanks to confidence because he has never heard "no thanks". He got more talks and experience thanks to sexism.
We really need to interrogate the concept of meritocracy a lot more:
"Many deride our meritocracy for not really working for the poor, for people of colour, for women; they see structural impediments to these groups as preventing a real meritocracy from flourishing. But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?"
Because once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away. No one chooses who their parents are, no one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game."
-- Freddie de Boer (from The Cult of Smart, an incredible book btw)
“ A well-written, highly intelligent book, inveighing against various aspects of the current meritocracy, and how they contribute to what the author calls “social injustice.” People who do educational policy, or who think about inequality should read this book. But ultimately what is his remedy? I would sooner attack homework, credentialism, and bureaucratization than testing. And yes, IQ is overrated, but the correct alternative view emphasizes stamina and relentlessness in a manner that I don’t think will make deBoer any happier. To lower the status of smarts, in the meantime, I fear is not going to do us any good.”
This is obviously true. Nobody deserves to take pride in anything, whatever you consider "merit"; Mark Twain wrote an essay called "What is Man" arguing this. Everybody is a product of their environment.
On the other hand, remember what Roman Hruska said about needing some representation of mediocre people on the Supreme Court?
"We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos."
I think wealth is essentially a means of distributing, directing and exchanging social power. So wealth and scarcity are not necessarily cruel, unless you feel like cruel deprivation is necessary to maintain social power. Then the question is not how do you distribute cruelty and wealth, but rather, how do you direct society in order to minimize cruelty?
I think meritocracy would be a really bad way to go about this, because rooting power in 'merit' would very quickly lead to merit being defined as whatever maintains incumbent power. So you'd end up with not only something that isn't meritocratic in any reasonable sense, but also corrupts the idea of merit. And since that's often knowledge-based merit, you'd end up with a situation where whatever 'knowledge' incumbents had proved proficiency in would become something they would protect against all challengers. Intellectual stagnation and extreme discouragment of creativity would be the norm.
Goldstein says the Inner Party of Oceania is a meritocracy:
> "The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area."
> "The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat."
I don't know how reliable a narrator Smith may be, because as an Outer Party member he's obviously an auxiliary who failed his quals...
Also, we mustn't forget that reasonable incumbents won't protect against all challengers, merely most. The cream of society must consist not solely of the rich and the thick, but also a few nouveau aristos, if it wishes to be stable.
I capture the rising elite
You utilise potential leadership cadres from historically superseded classes
They cut in the smart boys from the opposition, so that they can't set up a racket of their own
> once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification for the edifice of meritocracy falls away
Not from a society-level utilitarian perspective.
Meritocracy aims to elevate the most competent people to the elite ranks while working to remove incompetent elites from power. (Given power is a zero-sum game, we have no short-term solution to the existence of elites.)
A properly-tuned meritocratic measure thus looks for what a society needs in its elites to survive and thrive. (We don’t have such a function.) It may not be fair, individually. But it will he efficient, socially.
Paradoxically, those elites must then recognise that their position is largely a result of luck, and thus not an opportunity to become extractive towards the rest of the populace. That latter component means not every selection mechanism should to be meritocratic. This is one philosophical basis for balancing a meritocratic private sector and public service with elected elites, whose selection is decidedly not meritocratic.
> Using merit as a proxy for competence is where a lot of the trouble starts
These debates tend to get diluted absent a specific meritocratic measure.
With respect to college, I think the sole question to be answered by such a measure is probability of the admitee graduating. We are able, to some degree, to predict this.
Given such a measure, it doesn’t make sense to give a seat to someone who has a 5% chance of graduating over someone with a 90% chance.
> I think the sole question to be answered by such a measure is probability of the admitee graduating.
A society where the only criteria for access to higher education is that one graduates - and then perhaps goes on to do nothing with their education, or even just maintains the status quo - is a failure in my book.
If we wanted to look at their contributions to capitalism using a market measure (I'm not claiming this is even a good measure) then university dropouts like Bill Gates and Zuck are already examples of how your measure fails.
(Although Gates did eventually graduate 34 years after starting, hopefully the point is clear and we don't need to get pedantic about a simple example).
>> I think the sole question to be answered by such a measure is probability of the admitee graduating.
>A society where the only criteria for access to higher education is that one graduates - and then perhaps goes on to do nothing with their education, or even just maintains the status quo - is a failure in my book.
These two differing opinions showcase the problem with any meritocracy. That being - merit is ultimately subject to an opinion. This is not to say that a metric can be objectively used to determine merit (it can), it's that who's ultimately 'merrited' to determine what merits X?
Right - but are we talking the 'merit' of billionaires or the 'merit' of being an engineer who can pass difficult math exams? Totally different things, and conflating them is not helpful.
Take two individuals with the aptitude and the willingness to learn engineering and pass said exam. Give one person enough money to pursue an engineering degree. Burden the other one with an ailing parent. There is no conflation here.
Similarly. Take two people with the aptitude. Have them both spend a year messing about. One of them has a family who can afford to help them get back on track, the other doesn't.
I'm doing really well despite falling off the rails a bit in my early 20s. If I didn't have my family to help me, I'd not be doing nearly as well.
That's not my point. My point is that the 'geometric increase' for real competence or aptitude is not the same as the compounding 'merit' of a billionaire which may well just be some monotonic increase in the value of some company within which they have a stake. Your issue is a different one, and yes, if both of them are 'good enough' perhaps they should go through a random selection process.
But what is merit? Take the "aptitude and the willingness" in the other reply: we cannot decide to be naturally driven or passionate about something, or being quick learners and so on.
We can only decide to put efforts into something. Unless our energy is depleted by issues that we cannot control, ranging from being concerned about financial difficulties, family issues, to physical and mental health, and so on.
We can't lower global warming by 3 degrees, so it's useless to lower it by 2
Mostly fair is worse than completely fair, but way better than unfair or random.
If 80% is getting a fair deal, but you wanting to solve the issue for the remaining 20% results in making things worse for the 50%, you're not solving the issue.
Not to mention, what even is merit? Is it present skill? Potential for future skill? I know plenty of people who are advanced not because they're brilliant, but because they got started earlier, because they had parents who enrolled them into math camp, because they went to schools that taught a more in depth curriculum.
Sure; but we don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of the good. “Fair capitalism” also doesn’t exist in society. But in both cases it’s worth asking - do we want more capitalism / meritocracy or do we want less? Is the problem that our assessment tools are too easy for rich people to game, or is the problem meritocracy itself?
Random selection would get obviously terrible outcomes too, but for different reasons. I’ve yet to hear anyone who complains about the inherent biases in meritocracy propose any system which isn’t just as pathological. Like, what does “fair” actually mean here? Should we select based on IQ tests? That’s illegal. Select based on conscientious? That biases for people who have free time - and hence it biases for wealth. Select randomly? Actually it turns out society benefits more from educating our best and brightest.
“Meritocracy“ is never perfect. But it’s better than any other system I can think of. Complaining is easy. If you were in charge, how would you make it better?
Random selection is important to know if your system actually improves anything, or if the results are only good because the input was good to begin with.
For all we know, those universities that only pick the best and brightest may actually produce inferior results that are nevertheless still very good.
Thomas Sowell, when challenged on the success of charter schools in New York as being biased due to a "better selection" of students, was able to point out that this bias was limited by the fact that admission was based on a lottery.
Great! This is getting closer to a testable hypothesis. I’m imagining “students chosen randomly from the applicant pool, and students chosen based on merit will have indistinguishable academic results”. This isn’t perfect yet but it’s closer to being testable.
However, my hazy understanding from psych lectures years past is that similar experiments have already happened and the results are in. University achievement was found to be correlated with big 5 consciousness and IQ. (I can’t remember the effect sizes.) I have no idea how well the US collage admissions process selects for those traits. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I would bet money a lottery would lower the average academic achievement of collage graduates.
> I’m imagining “students chosen randomly from the applicant pool, and students chosen based on merit will have indistinguishable academic results”. This isn’t perfect yet but it’s closer to being testable.
That's not the point though.
Remember, the article proposes to draw a random sample from all applicants who are "good enough", so you would have some sort of aptitude test. However, instead of selecting the best N results from that test, you select a random N.
I wouldn't hypothesize that the results are going to indistinguishable or even that they will be better. I would argue that total welfare may improve as a result and that is worth testing.
The reason is as follows: If you only take the "best and brightest", there's little room for improvement.
> Random selection is important to know if your system actually improves anything, or if the results are only good because the input was good to begin with.
Right, this is the scientific approach. You have to disprove the null hypothesis, otherwise your theory is unsubstantiated.
Whenever people talk about meritocracies as being real things or potentially real things that merely require everyone to be on board to implement, I always wonder how old they are and whether or not they think they would benefit from being in a meritocracy, and to what degree they think they’ve been screwed over in the past by not being in a meritocracy. IME, they’re almost always little kids up through people working their first job and frustrated that everyone hasn’t perceived their brilliance yet. Or insecure adults frustrated at their lack of success compared to what they think they deserve.
I’m not saying meritocracies are bad- they’re the ideal, they’re generally what everyone wants. Of course you want the best people for a given job or educational opportunity. But when people start talking about meritocracies as if the only thing preventing us from having better ones are people making conscious decisions to have them, I seriously wonder about their life experiences, worldliness, and personal/professional maturity.
For example, it’s common for people to attack things like pushes for diversity as being antithetical to meritocracies, but the intention of things like encouraging diversity is to build the foundation for better meritocracies in the future by helping weed out the things that stand in the way of better meritocracies now. And it’s also very common for those same people to be convinced that if only the world was more meritocratic, they would personally be more successful and everyone would respect them more, because they see themselves as not getting what they think they deserve. Funny how that works, kinda like how libertarians generally think that if only everything was more libertarian, they personally would be more successful, because other people would no longer hold them back. They think some other people would be more successful too, and some less deserving people would be less successful, but their emotional pull for the whole belief system comes from thinking they deserve more than they’ve got and that it must be someone else’s fault. And IME, in practice they’re super wrong about that, but it must be a wonderful sort of fantasy to go through life believing. “I’m better than everyone seems think I am, and it’s other people’s fault that everyone doesn’t see me that way. If only all those other people would see the light and stop holding me back and allow the truly meritorious like myself to flourish!”
> When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline.
> "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."
These two sentences contradict each other. Also, if making money was as easy as you say once you have a pile of money the Forbes Rich List would be much more stable than it is. In reality most of the extremely wealthy fail to beat an index fund over the generations because of hubris. The Rockefellers are still rich but their combined wealth as a portion of the US economy is less than the founder of their fortune’s was when he made it.
None of this matters to the organizations offering patents of nobility of course. Ideally they’d be abolished, all real property expropriated and the IP released to the public domain. Anything that reduces their prestige is to the good though. Reducing the fellow feeling of the ruling class by giving them a less concentrated base of experience is to the good.
> Liberal technocrats give us literally no reason at all to think their interests are aligned with the great majority of people, yet when they are attacked as a governing class they stress their credentials and competency. But it'd be worse if they're doing bad stuff efficiently!
...
> The American system of government was built on the assumption that the most salient political divides would reflect geography, not ideology or class. The senator from Massachusetts would share bonds in common with the lay citizenry of Boston that he did not share with a senator from South Carolina. On the national sphere this would allow him to represent the interests of his constituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in American history than others; yet because of the way American politicians are elected, this sense of representing the interests of a geographically bounded group of people is more true in the political arena than in most others.
> Things have not always been this way.
> Though commentators sometimes speak of the old WASP gentry as an earlier era's national elite, they were not really so: they were the business, cultural, and political elites of one region of America. They ruled the roost in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. During the WASP heyday these states had greater economic and demographic heft than other regions in the nation, and so families with names like Roosevelt, Adams, and Lodge had an outsized influence on national politics and culture. But those families were not competing against the best and brightest of the entire nation: they were competing with each other. Texas' best and brightest did not strive to get into Harvard—they strove to get into Baylor. They were generally satisfied to be Texas elites, and if they operated on the national stage they tended to think of themselves as such.
Beating an index fund while also spending some of the money is vastly more difficult than just beating the index. The real question is do they beat inflation. And in that context you see:
Churn on that list is largely an illusion.
The wealth required to maintain a spot on Forbes list is growing significantly faster than inflation. Wealth that would have put you in first place in 1992 ($6.3 Billion) or 12.49 Billion in 2020 money, is less than 1/2 what it takes make the top 20 today. Don’t worry Bill Gated may have lost the #1 spot, but hey he’s got 7x as much money despite giving away billions.
Related to this, I feel like there's a missed opportunity for the federal government to create a national public online university.
There's a lot of talk about online education being the future of education on the one hand and a lot of talk about "College For All" / cost of education / inclusivity on the other hand, but it seems like the people who care about the two things are disjoint.
I used to teach physics, and every semester it was the same thing: confusion about the right-hand-rule, rotational motion, Gauss' law, ..., and every year I explained things the same way (and so did all the other teachers in the classrooms next door.) Why not record these lectures in some ridiculously high-end way, blowing $10M on that one course, make it epic, and then just be done with it? Imagine the amount of money that's spent every year teaching stuff over and over again...
The federal government should allocate something like $1B-$5B toward building out a virtual course catalog and open it up for free to the public. I feel like it could fill the need of community colleges / public four-year institutions quite well. In fact, I could see community colleges basically transition into a set of distributed testing facilities where you go to take your final exams or something.
When I took physics in community college, we joked that we were getting a Caltech education for $13 per credit hour because the instructor would just show videos of some famous physicist lecturing there.
College should be a meritocracy, it's just that we want people to be able to be able to afford it and not be shit out of luck if they can't go to it. This would also reduce stress as you don't have to worry about not getting into a college if you know your life is going to turn out fine either way.
Why has this goal been malformed and twisted around to the point where people are coming up with any solution that doesn't involve tackling the cost and the career issue?
Meritocracy does not require strict ranking of individuals. Selecting cohorts instead of individuals is still meritocracy. You could use weighted probabilities, with higher scores meaning higher probabilities but still short of certainty, and it would still be meritocracy. The OP's point is that when measurement error is as large as it is for college admissions, using a simple lottery to narrow the cohort is as good as any other method wrt getting the best students, and better in terms of fairness/diversity. Not saying it's correct, or that "meritocracy" as it exists now is something we must preserve, but "it's not meritocracy" isn't true.
> The OP's point is that when measurement error is as large as it is for college admissions, using a simple lottery to narrow the cohort is as good as any other method wrt getting the best students
Not really. Lets say every student scores within 10 percentage point of their true "merit". So if you only pick the top 1% scorers you actually could get students down in the top 11%. So why not just pick top 11% by random? Because when you pick a top 11% scorer you extend your range so you now could get as low as top 21%. Ranking them still matters quite a lot even if error range is larger than their pick range.
You can pick a different random set of inputs and come to the opposite conclusion.
It could be true that there is no correlation between true "merit" and test scores when you get to, say, the 99%th percentile. Especially since the predictive ability of these tests must be suspect now that you can study strategies for them.
In that situation, Harvard shouldn't value a 1600 any more than a 1540.
I disagree that college should be a pure meritocracy. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds would have a really hard time getting into college, even though many are extremely smart and have great potential to succeed at college. Meritocracy is biased towards the privileged.
> Students from disadvantaged backgrounds would have a really hard time getting into college, even though many are extremely smart and have great potential to succeed at college
If they’re smart and have potential to succeed, a meritocratic measure should rank them favourably. The problems with tipping the scales too far are (1) it’s inefficient, in that the total likely production of the student body is lowered and (2) it can backfire, by visibly creating a two-tier student body between those admitted on their own merits and those admitted for other reasons.
In the United States, we tend to tip the scale towards privilege through legacy admissions and institutional advancement programs. We also tip them towards social goals through affirmative action.
Both my undergrad uni, and the university I am teaching at, in Pakistan, have an outreach program, where they find ~50 excellent students from the poorest sections of society, and give them a full ride (tuition + living expenses). Some of these students would not even have gone to any uni, let alone to some of the best unis in the countries.
Based on my non-statistical observational view, these programs are insanely effective at helping these students. Hell, some of the best students in the uni are exactly these poor students. The most successful student from my batch grew up in a village in the middle of nowhere and went to MIT for a physics PhD.
I have seen very little evidence of two-tier because some of the privileged are lazy and don't achieve much in uni.
> We have to this point been unable to produce such a measure
We have not been able to produce a precise measure. But we’re able to e.g. identify quartiles. Compressing the measure to “likely to graduate” tends to take care of a lot of the lifting.
That’s why a random selection component makes sense. It is honest about our limitations. And it removes the stigma from those who met the fuzzy threshold but didn’t get admitted.
When that is the definition of meritocracy, I agree. But for me, true meritocracy implies an even playing field for everyone, and proper measures taken to correct it when it's uneven. In turn this implies: huge and long-term investments in public education, not to mention myriad other social reforms. Much more work than just giving everybody the same test and calling it a day, and calling that "meritocracy".
I think your argument is engaging in “what aboutism” and detracts from the issue this article is trying to address.
The problem they are trying to address is that true meritocracy only exists in a perfect system,
that is to say that you can not fairly compare individuals across different environments. More concretely one of the problems it is trying to account for the situations where wealth or post code privilege gives students an advantage over other students.
There are often situations where students just performed better on a standardized test because they could afford a couch or had better teachers and not because they are “smarter” or more capable.
> There are often situations where students just performed better on a standardized test because they could afford a couch or had better teachers and not because they are “smarter” or more capable
The solution is to make sure that students have good teachers and a couch (??) to become more capable, and not to waste limited elite teaching resource on less-capable students.
In order to make sure that students have good teachers, one challenge is making it possible for people from impoverished communities to be able to get high-quality schooling so that they can either become teachers or earn money that can go back into those communities.
There is also a question of how to define "merit." Standardized tests aren't that meaningful or accurate. It's a good way to roughly separate people out, but it shouldn't be considered merit. Especially since people spend a bunch of time learning strategies for it, further reducing its predictive ability.
You're assuming that standardized testing procedures, high school grading, and college admissions officers have the precision necessary to correctly distinguish between the 99.9997% perfect candidate and the 99.9998% perfect candidate.
All I can say is that's nuts. I got a perfect score on my ACT, and I know for a fact that I guessed on some questions. Am I really a stronger applicant than somebody else who made less-lucky guesses?
There's a garbage-in/garbage-out problem here where people who desperately want "meritocracy" are deluding themselves into believing they can accurately identify "merit" down to some extremely fine precision.
> Am I really a stronger applicant than somebody else who made less-lucky guesses?
Well, what you seem to be saying is that the selection process is basically randomized among the top candidates already, per the linked article... so, no change needed?
It's actually an argument for making the SAT harder.
You can see on the Asian curve for the SAT, that cohort saturates the high end. The SAT should be so difficult that no one gets a perfect score without being lucky.
And lucky guesses on an entrance exam is a better filter than a lottery, because it feels like merit. For an MIT degree to mean "I'm reasonably smart and very lucky" would be a disaster, for society and for MIT students both. The illusion of agency simply must be maintained.
> Anyway the alternative proposed here is replacing lucky question guesses with luck via a lottery.
Yes, this proposal is more transparent and honest about the factor luck plays in the outcomes. It doesn't try to launder luck through some test numbers and essays to pretend it's purely meritocratic.
Even were the tests perfect, rich people and ones with additional free time can take more attempts with reduced cost to themselves and families.
Additionally, tests are extremely time boxed, while actual research work is much more lax. Tests also do not measure cooperation, a crucial thing in real life research and development.
Speed is not necessarily quality, and we don't know how correlated it is.
75 years of test validity research say we DO know how correlated tests are with every conceivable definition of "quality." Your comment suggests you just haven't bothered to look.
Multiple attempts on tests don't help very much. We have 75 years of reliability research to show that. It's not single sample estimation. It's a couple hours to collect A LOT of samples.
Of course, money for tutoring, better schools, and highly-educated parents help with test outcomes and are a barrier to socioeconomic mobility. The basic problem is, random selection aside, no one has proposed a fairer system. Read Animal Farm at some point to see what happens when you have revolutions against an unfair system, without proposing something better to take its place..
But my basic point is you're confusing things YOU don't know with things WE don't know. We know a lot about tests, their upsides, their downsides, and alternatives. It's not like there aren't scientific conferences on this stuff.
And the scientific consensus says they aren't in the same galaxy as ranking 99.9997% to 99.9998%. SAT, for example, is better than grades are predicting first year GPA, but it's still not that great.
My point wasn't about the level of validity. My point about making inane comments. OP claimed we don't know things which we DO know simply because OP hasn't bothered to look.
Your numbers, 99.9997% to 99.9998%, roughly ask whether we can distinguish the second-best student in America from the fourth-best with an SAT.
I'm not quite sure anyone is either using the SAT for that, or claiming it's a helpful tool for that. Indeed, at that level, it's not even clear what ranking even means. If you believe people are using the SAT this way, please point me in their direction.
Again, inane comments aren't helpful for advancing the discussion. We have specific facts and numbers to work from. Trump popularized the art of making up facts on the fly, but it's not one I recommend adopting more broadly.
Harvard, Yale, etc. absolutely are claiming that they can separate the 2000th "best" student who gets in from the 2001st student who doesn't. If they wanted to fill their freshman classes entirely with valedictorians with perfect SAT scores, they have the applicant pool to do that.
My assertion is that there's no way for them to accurately make distinctions that fine. Much more honest to set some bar of "you must be at least this proficient to perform academically at Yale" and then pull names out of a hat containing everyone who meets that standard.
As it stands, the current admissions regime looks designed to reify class privileges in America.
This is thread reads like a Donald Trump speech. AstralStorm claims science doesn't exist, when there are whole conferences. rhino369 fakes up some numbers. And now, you come in making fake claims about Harvard and Yale admissions.
I mean, yes, no one is arguing that the admissions regime isn't there to reify class privilege, but if you're going to try to fix the problem, you can't start with falsehoods, half-truths, or sloppy thinking.
Quantifying "good enough" is not easy. I work in higher ed analytics. For even a mildly selective school that accepts 40-60% of it's students, there's certainly a group that are very likely "accepts", a group that are very likely "rejects", but 15-20% in the middle require very close review and interpretation of academic trends, non-cognitive attributes, how hard they pushed themselves, and more.
The more selective a school gets, the more applicants meet sone easy to quantify metrics, and the more that close review becomes necessary for making all decisions.
It is a problem that such room for professional judgement introduces room for bias and unfairness. But a random selection based on one-dimensional metrics isn't really the solution: sound training and transparency into the decision-making process would be good start in resolving these problems, though probably just a start.
> Should Select Randomly From a Pool of ‘Good Enough’
But... they already do.
I can't find links right now, but deans of admissions from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. all talk about how they could admit 10x the students and they'd all be equally good.
And that their selections aren't exactly "random" but are focused on diversity: that there are enough players for each instrument in the orchestra, athletes for each sport, varied extracurriculars in general, students for each major, with a diversity of race, ethnicity, nationality, geography, and so on. That early-decision candidates obviously have a bigger chance, etc.
But for a student who gets into Harvard and Princeton but not Yale or Columbia, it is essentially random -- e.g. Harvard and Princeton hadn't allotted all their trumpet players already but Yale and Columbia did.
Of all the kids in my IB class in high school, the kid that played the bassoon got into more schools than any of the rest of us, even with moderately worse grades.
Then they will be found out since the differentiator between the top pool of 'good enough' undergraduate programs is merely being able to play king maker to students who were going to go far in life anyway. And in return, the top students help brand the university as being top.
Basically, using academic aptitude as an entrance qualification includes/excludes different races unevenly, (Asians and Whites do better) so this is a way to get round that. Lowering the standards and using randomness is a roundabout way to discriminate against Asians and Whites, but not explicitly. Of course, another way of looking at it is that tests are racist because of the variation in results.
My point is that Universities have a brand for taking top tier raw undergrad students and moulding them into elite graduates who lead the world. In reality, many of those top tier students would succeed no matter what (raw talent, sheer will, family connections, etc).
If you dilute the pool in a meaningful way then 5% of the top 10k students go to Top Tier Uni 1; 5% to Top Tier Uni 2, ... Top Tier Uni 20. In ten years the outcomes of the students will no longer be biased towards Top Tier Uni 1 since students were dispersed across the top 20. Instead they are spread uniformly across the top 20. Why would TTU1 agree to lose their #1 place?
This is predicated on the reasonable belief that the Top 20 Undergraduate programmes are all 'good enough'.
The idea in the post looks very similar to an old Athenian system for elections. I think it'd be a great tool for fighting corruption and could produce good education opportunities with a lesser risk of institutional bias and other forms of problems related to human-based (s)election.
Yes. This is a fantastic idea that would reduce stress for thousands of students, elegantly address questions of unfairness, and take wind out of the sails of people who think their admission to $PoshUni proves them to be a better calibre of person.
For all these reasons, I cannot possibly imagine the ruling class would allow this to happen.
This is generally known as sortition and was common in the ancient world.
I've always felt it modern democratic politics would benefit greatly from such a system. I'm not sure the same is true of academia, you want students good enough that they do not risk failing at an elite institution, but when setting the threshold for "good enough" it's easy to reproduce the same inequalities you were trying to avoid in the first place.
I think the point is that the underlying metrics have a degree of randomness which we need to recognize. Instead of just deciding what is good enough to make it at Harvard and have that be the cutoff, you could certainly set the cutoff higher but still have randomness after that point. Don’t introduce arbitrary sorting when that is really not possible.
I TA’d a class where we used a grading metric sort of like this. It turns out that it is a lot easier to grade assignments by grouping them into 5 buckets than it is to give an extremely precise point value to everything.
Why does everybody think going to the Ivyies is such a good thing? I suspect they are now a net loss for all but the uppermost tier.
If you want to do research as an undergrad, the big name schools are a detriment. They have plenty of good grad students. Pick a university outside the top 20 but still top 50 (still quite a good university) and be an amazing undergrad and you'll have professors fawning over you to do research for them. You'll have multiple publications and recommendations coming out the wazoo as you head into grad school.
If you're a mediocre student at an Ivy, this isn't going to open that many doors as most people are better or better connected than you. Dubya didn't get where he was due to Yale; he got where he was because he was a Bush.
I don't get this obsession with the Ivies unless you're on very particular tracks.
FWIW in France until last year, admission to most universities (except the top ones) was through a draw ('tirage au sort à l'université'). It's been changed last year though not without controversies.
I don't know the historical context though about why and how it's been this way.
Let's take it further. Colleges should be government-funded, and their level of discretionary funding should be based on how they are rated by their students and an independent assessment of their students' skills and general knowledge (to be administered before and after attending).
While there's something to be salvaged from your idea (I was amazed when some of my expensive courses were taught by a TA, and one we couldn't even understand), unis aren't just vocational schools.
One of the most important classes I took during my engineering degree was a philosophy 101 course I procrastinated until my last semester. 11 years later I somehow still periodically get to talk about Callicles (from Gorgias) with a stranger at a bar—it's happened twice—, and it's generally awakened me to reading philosophy, something I assumed was dull and impenetrable.
I have no idea how any of that could be measured on a standardized test, and it would be a shame if it was dropped from curriculum just because it can't easily be measured.
Uni is more than a vocational school that prepares us for the work camp.
That's great. You should be able to take those classes if you want to.
Near-as-makes-no-difference half of the classes I was required to take in university -- my upper- and lower-division "general education" -- were an absolute waste of time for which I was forced to pay.
Even if I was forced to spend that money, I would have been better served by pretty much any other experience that carried an equivalent cost -- like spending a year backpacking in Europe and Asia.
Sure, and I have plenty of grievances myself. My expensive university calculus and physics courses were so bad (a rushed professor and TAs we couldn't understand) that we would meet up after the course to watch Youtube videos to learn the subject and do the homework. We'd joke after class, "yeah, that was definitely worth $X,XXX" with a tear in our eye.
Ended up taking a $120 summer course at a community college and mastered the subjects.
I spent a lot of time in uni wishing I was spending that time backpacking around Asia. But I also experienced the woes of standardized tests in high school and I'm reluctant to see them as a solution to anything.
How would you do it? There isn't some generic "philosophy" curriculum. The works you study in such a course, including literature and the other arts, are arbitrary.
Either the test's philosophy section chases down so many long-tails that you get most of them wrong just to get one right, or the entirety of your philosophy experience comes down to a few topical questions on a test that just miss the topics your courses covered.
That's the curse of standardized tests and why they ultimately shrink the possible curricula to fit inside of them. Is it the students that really benefit from this? Or are they the ones that suffer from our attempts at making things measurable?
> The works you study in such a course, including literature and the other arts, are arbitrary.
Not really. It's like any field of study. If you have N-many hundreds of hours in which to teach undergraduate-level math, ultimately you just have to pick the topics you think are most appropriate/beneficial. Same if you're teaching history, or graphic design, or engineering, or philosophy.
I don't see that it's particularly difficult to assess a student's grasp of philosophy. You can just ask exam questions to assess their understanding, and/or use long-form essays. Undergraduate philosophy courses seem to manage this ok. It's not like assessing an art project, which is inherently very subjective.
The whole point of going to top schools / universities is to be around other kids who have the drive, ambition, wherewithal, and societal advantages that you have. Then you get to benefit from the parochial altruism. Why would I go to a random uni when I can aim at the rich person uni?
It's not mentioned in the article, but one benefit of this approach would be as an A/B test to see which group was more successful in life - ie. the successful applicants or the rejects?
This would allow the college to see exactly how much value they are providing.
education is not a scarce goods - why not accept _all_ candidates that are good enough? The cost of educating one more student is marginal, and if there's a large enough number, economies of scale can kick in as well.
Education itself is not, but going to a top college is not the same as getting an education. If Bryan Caplan's idea of college being mostly about signaling[0] is true, then top colleges can't scale. They are an exclusive club and a lot of the benefits of top colleges come from being exclusive. Opening it up to more people reduces these benefits for the students.
The cost of filling one more seat in a massive lecture theatre is marginal. At university, I audited a number of courses with no impact on staff or students.
The cost of marking one more essay and giving comprehensive feedback is more significant, even if there is a comprehensive rubric to hand it off to an assistant.
The cost of running one more seminar/tutorial group for every 10 extra students is significant. A degree based on lectures alone, without giving all students the opportunity to ask questions, is less valuable.
The cost of courses that involve more consumables (chemistry, biology) or more face-to-face interaction (languages) is significant per student.
Economies of scale might work in the first term, where the the purpose is to get everyone up to a certain common (and quite low) level. Someone with only a first degree in the subject might be capable of teaching that. In later years, you can't all be taught by a world-class expert in the field.
The cost of physically expanding a university is significant. It can also be very difficult. I once had a term when I had a 15-20 minute walk between adjacent classes, because the nearest place the university could expand into was an old school about a mile away.
"qualify" is nebulous. When professors accept PhDs, they are looking for people who they want working in their specific labs. It is much more like applying to a job than applying to undergrad. I have pulled candidates from the pile who had sub-par test scores but excellent writing skills, for instance, because teaching good writing to adults is much harder for me than teaching computer science. Similarly, I've taken students who reached out to me with ideas for followup on my papers over students with great test scores who didn't seem to care what they worked on. Random sampling is a terrible strategy for PhD admissions.
One point about this that I think is overlooked is that if you don't include some sort of randomness, you'll end up over-optimizing for whatever you're measuring, and under-optimizing for the thing you actually care about. More concretely, if we say that there are some underlying factors which correlate to both student "quality" and to admissions scores, and some random factors, we'll find that score and quality are correlated, but the highest quality students and the ones with the highest scores aren't the same ones. This is easier to explain using a graph: if we assume that "score" and "quality" are two gaussian variables, we get a graph that looks like
If you do the naive thing, and grab the very highest-scoring students, we set the cutoff at 27, and get all 10 of the students labeled by A in the above diagram, thus have a quality distribution of 10 - 14, with the bulk being around 10 - 13, and the average score being 11.5. If we instead set the cutoff at 23, we get 47 students (labelled B for students above the average of the originally selected ones, and C for the ones below that average) -- if we then pick among them randomly, we'll get a flatter distribution ranging from a low score of 6 to a high score of 15, with an average of 10.98. The distribution of scores looks like
So if you care a lot about simply not getting bad students, and not very much about getting the very best ones, you should do a strict cutoff, since that will give you the highest possible average. If you care more about getting the very best students, and are ok if you let in a few relative duds, you'll do better to lower your cutoff and select randomly from everyone who passed your cutoff.
Elite colleges get their reputation from having students who go on to do great things, so I'd argue that at least for them, the "cutoff plus random selection" makes sense.
I recently heard a podcast with Andrew Yang and Scott Galloway (professor at NYU) [1] and the summary was pretty much that he attended UCLA at a time that it was not only affordable, but also when they were willing to take on local students with less than stellar or 'good enough' backgrounds, in order to remain apt to the articles title, as the lower acceptance rate wasn't something that added to the institutions supposed prestige.
I think this underscores what happens when a supposed Social Good (which is funded as such at both a State and Federal Level) is used to primarily serve as a state-subsidized monetization scheme on it's Brand which will bend backwards to maximize its profits with International Students. I sincerely believe this is what inevitably comes when Education is centralized and is reduced to serve as an expensive commodity in the form of virtue signalling rather than serve as an actual institution of Higher Education for it's populace. And this needs to be understood before any reform to accommodate people who really shouldn't be there, which is quite honestly a large percentage of students with University degrees, before anything is undertaken.
I personally wanted to walk away when I realized what a farce University had become and I had to be talked into going back to class after I got Honors in Philosophy and told I'd get all expenses paid to debate moral ethics, all while I was a Biology major struggling to get classes to advance to Junior status and transfer to a CSU campus with more STEM based offerings only to get hit with budget and strikes when I transferred that resulted in even less course availability due to the financial crises.
Personally, I'm really enjoying seeing how quickly the disruption has occurred to Higher Education in the US, and the UK as you can now get some degrees for pre-2000s prices on Coursera. College of London offers an Online Bsc CS degree for $17k, and CU Boulder offers an MSc EE for ~$20k. I paid 65k for BSc at a CSU and graduated in 2009. And while I'd love to see a further race to the bottom in terms of pricing, I take solace in that they know that its inevitable.
CU Boulder recently allowed students to move in last week, and in that time 13 people have tested positive for COVID on campus, and one has died in the county in that time [2]. But it must be said, if you're really thinking going for the 'Campus Life' during this pandemic than I'm afraid to say no prestigious degree is going to save you from the Real World when it comes crashing down and you have no real understanding of cost-risk-benefit analysis. It must also be noted that the only classes offered on campus right now are for things like Latin according to an interviewed student.
ALL schools should pick randomly from all applicants. I mean, honestly, I don't feel as passionately about this for colleges, but private preschools or kindergartens that select kids based on anything is super f-ed up and kind of enrages me. The gradual defunding of public education in the US as more and more people move to elite districts or private school (white flight) is bad enough. Then excluding any kids who are slower learners, more hyperactive, who have less advantages at home (the kids who actually need great school the most) even if they have the $$ is borderline Nazi-party-bad it is so vile.
Generally my take on this is: (1) all schools should select kids at random from applicants and (2) private schools should charge selected kids based on what those families can afford, up to their full tuition which in the Bay Area averages over $30K/year, (3) funding for every school should come from national or at least state level so travesties like Piedmont can't exist explicitly for the purpose of robbing poorer kids, 2 blocks away, from having decent schools (and parks, that's another subject).
Anything else is hyper regressive toward children. F-that!
(sorry to hijack the topic, but this is a subject I deal with a lot and royally pisses me off)
Selecting randomly from a cohort already judged good enough is a meritocracy. Perhaps you prefer the French model with a linear ranking nationwide and a cap on how many thousands down from the top can go to the ecole normale superieur?
In Australia we have linear rankings, you're placed in allotments of 0.05%. It does favour the kids from rich backgrounds but the smart kids from poor backgrounds get a good shot at attending a solid university.
Standardised tests measure academic potential, i.e. probability of graduating and likely value added to society from the educational experience, with a fair amount of error. Taking everyone within a standard deviation of the cut-off and randomly selecting therefrom admits this error and removes the stigma from those just below the previous, false cut-off. If one really wanted, and if the statistics merited it, one could use a weighted randomisation, with individuals scoring higher getting an advantage compared to those scoring lower.
Well, it enlarges the error. All you have done is to add an additional source of noise on top of the existing one.
> and removes the stigma from those just below the previous, false cut-off
This it may do, it may well be psychologically easier to accept that you got unlucky on the coin flip rather than unlucky on which topic came up in question 13.
(Not sure what "false" means, the cut-off is a fact of how the system works.)
False as in we don’t know the person ranked 1,001 has less academic potential than the person ranked 999.
We know, with a decent likelihood, that the person ranked 1 has more than the person ranked 750. But someone at 1,250 is quite likely to exceed the academic potential of someone at 900. Hence the “falseness” of the cut-off.
Sure, but this is like insisting that every guy with Olympic gold holds a "false" medal, every time. While the stated rule is that it goes by who crosses the line first on the day, this obviously isn't a perfect measure of who's ultimately really in some other abstract sense the fastest man alive.
I guess the common way of deliberately adding noise is by rounding off scores, such as giving A/B/C instead of rank order. Which means that nobody gets a letter saying that their score (the one from the exam) has rank 1001.
> this is like insisting that every guy with Olympic gold holds a "false" medal, every time
Bad comparison. We have loads of statistics from sports showing there are highly-precise rankings. Run certain races repeatedly and you’ll find persistent rankings. Particularly at the most-competitive levels, where innate biology dominates in most sports.
Have a cohort of students re-take a standardised test a few times, on the other hand, and you’ll get a spread. Try to relate that spread to the things you’re actually trying to measure, academic potential, and it’s a hair better than a crap shoot.
Maybe. I'd hazard a guess that membership of the top 1000 places in a high-stakes national exam might actually be less noisy than a gold medal. That is, on a re-run, what percentage of people keep their top-1000 scores, and (on re-runs of the last 40 years olympics, times 100 individual events, say) what percentage of gold medalists would have kept theirs?
But I have not checked the numbers. Obviously if you restrict attention to those with exam scores near the boundary, you can get different results. And there are indeed other sports scores more precise than the one I mentioned.
You know meritocracy† was coined as term to satirise the problem of promoting "greatness", which is hard to measure and results in promoting conformity and class, as opposed to finding the creative minority who bring real progress?
Nowadays, the term is widely used in a positive way to describe 'creative minorities who bring real progress'.
It is confusing to use the old opposing definition of the word 'meritocracy' when everybody else around you is adhering to the original meaning of 'merit'.
Of course, whether or not we're able to accurately evaluate 'merit' is a decent question, but it is better to ask the question using metrics, than to try to answer using personal bias and satire.
The point of the satire, and the point of TFA, is that measuring 'merit' is difficult, if not impossible, and a focus on 'meritocracy' will lead to promoting those that perform best at the measurable proxies to merit, not actual merit.
It seemed worth pointing out that people are using a word conceived satirically to advocate for the very system that satire warned against. And it's an interesting bit of history.
Every good system need to strive to be a meritocracy, anyone arguing anything else is just talking nonsense. If it is impossible to determine who has more merit then every system is doomed to fail.
Best at 'measurable proxies of merit' is exactly what I think people should speak plainly about and fight for.
But, instead we have people that think that because merit cannot be perfectly measured we should stop attempting to find meritocracy and instead to select randomly.
Random selection must be worse than a measurable proxy.
I gain nothing personally from this system, because I didn't travel through a top college. But I do not think it's in my interests to completely destroy societies way of selecting people into important positions based on some idea of 'merit'.
Wow, I don't think I've ever been accused of Marxist propaganda before. Certainly not before lunchtime.
Okay, I'm going to try and be charitable. I agree that high IQ people create "real progress" and they come from the majority. A good example I expect we would agree on would be Steve Jobs: very smart, responsible for lots of progress.
The problem I see with meritocracy as it exists in the real world, for example, college admissions is that it doesn't reward Steve Jobs. It rewards the smart but boring, the clever but not too clever, the academically bright and socially conservative. When I quoted "minority", I didn't mean that there is some special cadre of people who are better; the quote refers to the fact that only a few people are responsible for human progress. There are plenty of high IQ people, but few Einsteins or Gates or Jobs.
And returning to TFA, it seems obvious that selecting an ever-smaller fraction based on quantifiable measurements doesn't measure merit. I'd argue "merit" is simply not accurately measurable, certainly not on a large enough scale for college admissions.
So the idea of selecting randomly from a fraction of "good enough" is likely to give as good a result, whilst also improving problems of social mobility and possible finding those diamonds in the rough who might have greater "merit" but not be good at standardised testing for whatever reason.
I know the person's intentions are good in putting forth such an idea, but the problem with intentions is that they're always good. But they often ignore the bad side effects of the idea when it comes to putting it into practice.
First, let's not mince words here -- this suggested policy is about lowering the bar for admission to top universities so that some previously unqualified tier of applicants has a better shot at getting in. These lower tier students get a better chance in a lottery, at the expense of people who through better work/aptitude/achievement/(and no small amount of luck, finance, or legacy also) would otherwise usually get in with high likelihood. (Note, those last exceptional categories are a small portion -- something like 10%.)
So what's one of the side effects here? Or let's call it incentives produced by such a system?
Well, perhaps it's that students, who throughout school are taught to study hard, do well, apply themselves, at the end face a selection that tosses that out the window and says, well, everyone is equally good and we're going to do a lottery. We're lowering the bar so that everyone who got above a B average has an equal chance of getting into Harvard.
Is that teaching them the right lesson? Is that incentivizing people to excel and be really good at something? How would you respond at work if at the end of the year, everyone doing a minimum amount of work were given the same salary?
I don't think you'd actually like that (most people reading these forums, at least). Now, I don't dispute that there's a lot of unnecessary pressure on students today. And part of it is a bigger problem that the population has grown while top spots have stayed relatively constant. So people are trying to fix this.
But I disagree with attempts to create artificial equality at the last step. We wouldn't accept this for anything else that matters -- you wouldn't prefer to be treated by a doctor who was just "good enough", or be flown by a pilot who barely passed the flight exam. In the name of lowering their level of stress, or making the doctor / pilot population look a certain way. And by the way, to make a difference in college admissions (according to the function I can imagine the author desires), you really have to lower the bar a lot.
I don't want these kinds of distortions for a system that my kids will be subject to. That's not the lesson I want them to learn. Students in other countries have a far harder and more competitive time than ours. I don't want them to wake up to that reality only when it comes time to apply for their first job and find themselves falling flat.
The problem is that those factors confound measurement so much that we don't actually know if the highest-scoring students are really the best. Lowering the bar in the face of absolute certainty and precision might be bad (that itself is a debatable point) but that's not what the authors are proposing.
people say that Ivy's get such a large number of applicants and accept such a small percentage that they could take their applicant pool, accept one cohort, put it aside, accept another cohort and the 2nd cohort would be just as successful as the first cohort.
If that is true, its not about lowering the bar, as both cohort pass the same bar, its just about increasing fairness.
if its not true, then yes, you are correct, it lowers the bar.
If you take the bottom 1/3 of any ivy class and replace it with the next folks in line, then I would probably agree in a hand-wavy kind of way.
Some points:
1. The folks who barely missed getting into (somewhat randomly) Columbia will most likely get into a place like Cornell. Is there really a loss there?
2. The folks who barely miss getting into Cornell will most likely get into a place like NYU. For most of these folks, is there really a loss there? My guess is that, at most, they lose some cocktail party swagger.
3. The top (15-30%?)of the classes at the Ivies really makes those schools academically. That said, there are a lot of other folks at the school that have significant social and intellectual capital to the schools. Athletes are one group, folks who demonstrably know how to get stuff done on a regional/national/international level are another group. Using these criteria to assess merit will produce a class not dissimilar to what we see now.
I think the issue is that I want a doctor who is competent, not just one who can get the best score on exams. More to the point, I want good effective fairly priced healthcare, not necessarily a doctor at all.
The current system is meritocracy with regards to a set of metrics very loosely associated with merit. It's insanity how much we read into meaningless differences in indicators of merit. We take an indicator that is very very loosely correlated with ability over the entire distribution, for typical applications, and assume that small differences at one end always matter. It's like reading tea leaves with regards to actual outcomes.
The problem with current inequity in society is that it's disproportionate and arbitrary. We frame these discussions as if it's meritocratic capitalism vs blind communism or something when what we have isn't actually meritocratic at all. If it were, we'd see much more diversity in society than we do, and many more options as consumers.
I'm not sure I agree with the proposal but at least it's honest. I'd rather have my child dealing with that than the current lie society tells itself. Then she wouldn't fall into a cycle of despair over a cruel fairy tale, and everyone would have a more accurate appraisal of what different outcomes mean.
Colleges are in for an extremely rude awakening. No more int'l student tuition coupled with the fact that most people don't need college anymore when you can learn better than some two-bit "professor" could teach you with just a set of instructional videos. Add in a take home exam and now you are running your own ivy league education for free.
It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic.
What I like about this system is that it helps a population that even the most altruistically inclined admissions office overlooks: the unprepared. I've met my fair share of students who are brilliant, hard workers but just do not play the game. Whether that's because of ignorance, fear of failure or some other factor, I do not know. They exist at every level; I've seen them for college, for tech jobs, probably for high school admissions. If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile.