>The economist Raj Chetty has found that nearly 40 of the country’s elite colleges and universities, including five in the Ivy League, accept more students from families in the top 1 percent of income earners than from the bottom 60 percent. The computer scientist Allison Morgan recently released a study examining 7,218 professors in Ph.D.-granting departments in the United States across the arts and sciences. She found that the faculty come from families almost 34-percent richer than average and are 25 times more likely than average to have a parent with a Ph.D. Faculty members at prestigious universities are 50 times more likely than the average person to have a parent with a Ph.D. American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring its graces on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families.
This is like the 'branch cut' equivalent of the social sciences, but rather than making the integral easier to compute, makes the argument sound more convincing than it actually is or supported by the evidence.
If one looks aat the actual data, admitees of elite colleges are hardly among the elite, but just somewhat wealthier than average.
We're not taking Rockefeller-level of wealth here.
But this holds even for non-elite colleges. It not that top colleges are biased against the lower classes, but that lower classes may just be less inclined to apply or score lower on standardized tests.
Is the median the right central tendency estimator to use? We're talking about a distribution with a huge amount of skewness. The top 20% of the class could all be from billionaire families and it wouldn't impact that chart.
I'm not surprised that Yale picked the median to plot, though, since it paints themselves in the best light.
> It not that top colleges are biased against the lower classes, but that lower classes may just be less inclined to apply or score lower on standardized tests
Oh, my. This is such a straight-textbook example of not seeing systemic bias.
Generations ago, elite colleges had quotas preventing or discouraging certain groups from applying. Those barriers have been removed. As it turns out, selecting for intelligence yields more for endowments and other benefits than selecting for prestige or lineage. This may not be completely fair, but is more fair than the old way.Tons of people apply to these schools. The SAT is still a useful despite being an imperfect filter.
It's easy to find seemingly well informed smart people who claim that, and also those who claim the opposite.
Outside physics, there is always a study that supports whatever you want to believe, so we can all keep believing whatever feels good, while being supported by Science!
I like to think I'm different. But odds are I'm not...
The reason why the SAT is "going away" as you noted, or at least the cited reason, is precisely what I noted.
If you want to take the position that there is no truth (or even just a better approximation thereof), that "we can all just believe what we want to believe", then there's no way to ever progress on such matters.
All serious research I have seen says that the SAT correlates to wealth, and not to college success. Indeed GPA is a much better predictor of college success.
These are the dream hoarder class, the upper middle class. The rest of us can’t compete and are instead destined for a life of poverty and mediocrity.
The rest of us that haven’t been intellectually or genetically blessed still have a place in society. I’m sick of being treated like a subhuman because I went to a state school and don’t make $300k a year at Facebook.
This is like the 'branch cut' equivalent of the social sciences, but rather than making the integral easier to compute, makes the argument sound more convincing than it actually is or supported by the evidence.
If one looks aat the actual data, admitees of elite colleges are hardly among the elite, but just somewhat wealthier than average.
http://yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/admissio...
We're not taking Rockefeller-level of wealth here.
But this holds even for non-elite colleges. It not that top colleges are biased against the lower classes, but that lower classes may just be less inclined to apply or score lower on standardized tests.