The following paragraphs were especially powerful:
> The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.”
> Applicants from the most affluent families excel at these games. A study at Stanford found that family income is more highly correlated with admissions essay content than with SAT scores. Applicants from well-to-do backgrounds are especially adept at crafting their essays in ways that please admissions committees.
If equity is so important, why not grant preferential treatment to all children coming from families that aren't upper-middle-class? Or ban legacy preferences at the very least? This is a simple and effective way of achieving the goals they claim to be championing. The author hit the nail on the head. Every other metric used for admissions is far more easily gamed by rich families. Hence why they are being preserved. Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack. All this talk about equity is the most convenient and cost-effective way to eliminate the one barrier that most vexes rich parents.
I'm experiencing this first hand. My family immigrated here from Bangladesh. Unlike much of my family, my dad had a college-degree required job lined up, and we ended up pretty comfortable with him on a GS-scale job and my mom selling furniture. Thanks to the SATs, my brother and I both ended up breaking into industries (banking, law) that until relatively recently were good old boy's clubs.
Now that I have kids at in private school, I have a totally different perception of the cultural capital these families have that we didn't. We have a second winter break for ski holiday. My daughter asked me why we don't ever go to Aspen. When we were kids, we didn't know anyone, we didn't know what to write in admissions essays. We had enough money to do test prep, but that's incredibly cheap in comparison. I'm not concerned about my kids if we move to a subjective admissions system. We'll send my daughter to Bangladesh to do some gold-star project and hire an admissions coach to wring my dad's story of growing up in a third world village for all its worth. But if I was a recent immigrant, or a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this.
Lower middle class (and even uneducated pedigree upper middle class) is where the brutalism is for competitive schools, but lower middle class has state schools (if in California, Cal State schools) or community college- and almost always finishes high school with a middle-of-the-pack education, thanks both to average public scholar and average home lives. So, generally they are fine.
I wish the obsession with top-tier colleges would go away. It’s not hard to get into a public research university, where there always an opportunity to shine, even if the average student is, well, average.
The real tragedy here though is costs have gone up quite a bit for state educations and the true top-tier educations have so many scholarships available that an average education costs more than a premium one.
I went to a state school but have spent far more of my life working at and with people from Princeton, Caltech, Stanford, etc…
When I attended Caltech, there was no evidence that it was a rich kids school. For example, very few students had a car. The ones that did had a Bug or an old Ford pickup. I don't recall anyone wearing tailored clothes, the students mostly wore completely unremarkable stuff. When I'd meet their parents, they were perfectly ordinary people.
Keep in mind that I attended in the 70s. Nothing stays the same. I have little idea if Caltech is the same today as then, and rather doubt it. One obvious change is their mission statement has changed drastically. In the 1978 "Caltech Information for Students" pg 105 it says simply:
> The primary purpose of the undergraduate school of the California Institute of Technology, as stated by the Trustees, is "to provide a collegiate education which will best train the creative type of scientist or engineer so urgently needed in our educational, governmental, and industrial development."
Ideally, the people of the future will have progressed beyond the relative savagery of me and my peers and look upon us with disdain. Perhaps for how much I enjoy a good steak, or for the genital mutilation of our boys.
So your idea of societal progress is one that believes all history is worth looking down on, that there's nothing in the past worth celebrating because every figure acted distasteful or had views distasteful to modern eyes?
I guess all of human civilization has just been a giant failure. The only chance we have is for us poor wretches to retroactively flagellate our ancestors and beg forgiveness from the gods of modern enlightenment, complete with the knowledge that we too will be flagellated in our own due time, and rightfully abhorred in the judgement of future generations, no matter our worldly achievements.
For all its supposed enlightenment, modern political correctness is really more akin to medieval Catholicism
I read Cato, but I have never respected him. I admire Churchill for his contribution to victory in WWII and his excellent playing of a weak hand, but he was a hideous human being for a lot to answer for. I have nothing but contempt for Jefferson Davis.
Yes, I even consider the Nazis terrible people no matter how widespread antisemitism was at the time and no matter how much public support they had. I have that view simultaneously with the understanding that there is no German my age who engaged in any of that.
There is nothing wrong with understanding and making moral judgements about people. I can look at a painting in a museum that has someone enslaved in the picture and both understand the context and be repulsed by the depiction.
It's proper for people to make moral judgements, and to understand both past injustices and contemporary injustices that one implicitly (one hopes not explicitly!) supports.
There is a great deal wrong with making moral judgments about people. People are complicated and you don’t have the full information to make an unbiased judgement.
The real issue here is it’s hard to revise such emotionally charged views in light of new information. Condemn people for murder and it will be harder for you to notice the innocent person on death row.
Worse, many people will try and influence your opinion via misinformation. Condemnation short circuits peoples ability for rational though and that’s exactly how normal people end up committing atrocities.
I guess you shouldn't go too far back in history then. If that's how you judge the average Nazi party member (as in the regular Nazi on the street at the time), I imagine you think every Swede during the time of the Vikings was correspondingly a terrible person. And every Frank, Mongol, Arab, Indian, Slav, and... yeah pretty much everyone back in the day. Cato included. With the whole world being so fundamentally morally terrible it's a wonder any good people managed to come into existence in the last 20 years to be the woke arbiters of morality for all past and future action.
The uncomfortable truth is that any of us, genetically unchanged but raised in post WWI Germany would most likely be Nazis during WWII.
> The uncomfortable truth is that any of us, genetically unchanged but raised in post WWI Germany would most likely be Nazis during WWII.
But of course: isn't that the important lesson? Most, but not all were; so is this knowledge an excuse to do nothing or is it a spur to look for the injustices one accepts today, and change one's position?
The Nazis party grew because so many Germans were looking for people to blame for the "injustice" of Germany's loss in WWI. You think your motivations are different than millions of people? It's the reduction of complex events and people that results in and excuses people doing horrendous things, because it permits them to see what they want to see and ignore the rest.
Beware anybody or anyone who seeks to erase the messiness and complexity of life. The pursuit of purity is the root of so much evilness. If you uncover the sordid past of a public figure, the right thing to do is exhibit that history alongside the better things they're known for, so that people learn and remember what real people look like; that nobody is a caricature; and that to avoid repeating the sins of history we must appreciate what we share with those who have committed those sins previously.
Or you could like... understand that people behave in the context of their time in history, be glad we've moved past that, and celebrate the contributions of the people that got us to where we are.
I can celebrate George Washington as a founder of the country and also understand he was a slave owner.
I think the problem is that we're really bad at any amount of nuance: people we celebrate are treated as flawless saints beyond reproach rather than humans who achieved something great in one area.
It turns out even Gandi, Mother Theresa, etc had a pretty sketchy side, because shocker no human actually meets that bar. But since we're categorically unable to say someone did a great thing while actually being pretty immoral by that's standards, the only options that the university seem to have available to it are entirely condoning their unacceptable side or else disowning them.
We have a dog and had cats. I have pet friends. They are free to leave as they wish. The cat left and then came back with kids. Then they left but some will come back and go. The dog is still there, doesn't seem so enthusiastic about going too far from the house.
And yes. I think slaving/caging an animal is brutal. But many animals will happily have your company.
I have an anecdote that I personally witnessed a few years ago, which makes your claim way more probable than some here would suspect.
I was visiting Bay Area a year before COVID and stopped by in Berkeley for something, iirc was getting brunch with friends. The first thing I see after parking is a full street closure and a large crowd that looked like it was marching down the street, with people holding banners, drumming, chanting slogans, etc.
Out of curiosity, I decided to check what it was about. As you have probably guessed by now, "pet ownership is slavery" was the theme (one of the banners in the front was saying exactly that).
I mean the obvious parallel to slavery, they are property owned by somebody who are not truly free to leave and have been bred to the point of dependence, are regularly neutered, are leashed regardless of need, they are commonly fed kibble produced from waste not fit for human consumption at rendering plants, and so on.
I'm not saying there couldn't be I don't know, a pet owner who took them in off the street or from a shelter, nursed them back to health, and are lifetime companions in a consensual idealised relationship, with the ownership mostly being a legal technicality. Yet there is an ethically dubious side to pet ownership which I could imagine getting the entire institution framed in a negative light in the distant future.
I imagine in the year 3000 there might be a future where schoolchildren will be shown holograms of rendering plants and told by the teacher "And this is what they fed the animals" and then a Labrador Retriever will have an AI write an essay which states that "the ownership or consumption of any animals, is fundamentally a crime against animal rights".
At least in the 70s, if you gamed your way into admission at Caltech by doing test prep, coaching, having someone else do your application essays, etc., you were going to be sorry. Because you would find it impossible to do the work required. Caltech did a good job of screening because the ones they admitted could do the work (though a lot dropped out simply because they didn't want to work). But there were a few that couldn't, no matter how hard they worked at it, and just wound up leaving.
A friend of mine dropped out of Caltech after a couple years, and disappeared. I ran into him many years later, and we did some catching up. 10 years after dropping out, he asked Caltech if he could come back and try again. They said sure (one of the nice things about Caltech's philosophy). He got straight A's. I asked him if he had gotten any smarter, he said no, he was just willing to work the second time around.
Of course, there were some students who just effortlessly aced everything. Hal Finney (yes, that Hal) was one of them. Being around people like that was just amazing.
For as far as I can remember, this is the same philosophy held at my alma mater: NJIT. I was admitted into the CS program in 07 and got put on probation my first semester. I transfered to community college and messed around with bad grades for a while until I got my act together. I was readmitted and from what I could tell, they essentially have guaranteed admission If you have at least like a ~2.6 GPA in a science related degree. Quite a low bar. However you are expected to work hard once in the program. That didn't change once I went back, although the school as a whole was a lot less scary and intimidating the second time around.
I think this is true for a lot of engineering schools. Maybe there just isn't as much of a demand to go to the pure STEM schools as there is the schools that have everything. Like I remember looking at requirements for Rutgers at the same time and essentially they had like a 3.2 (or maybe 3.4 GPA) minimum and you'd have to re-take all the core CS classes as they would not accept those classes from community college.
I observed the same admission principles at Georgia Tech (where I studied), and I am glad it was this way. GT was willing to give quite a lot of people a chance (especially if you were in-state), but it would not hold back punches once you were in.
For someone like me, who believed they could do it, but didn't have the "perfect" admissions packet (moving to the US midway through high school with very poor english and zero knowledge of how the US education/admission systems work will do that), it was the chance I needed, and I am immensely grateful for it.
> At least in the 70s, if you gamed your way into admission at Caltech by doing test prep, coaching, having someone else do your application essays, etc., you were going to be sorry.
I’m sure it’s still true today. Still, the incentive to game and coach through admissions is intense because of the potential rewards.
I went to my local 4 year which was nearly free, and I coasted through the CS program making it possible to do other things.
Still, my earnings were halved because of the lower quality of the CS program and I do wonder about the road not taken.
I think it’s even more
intense for students today; but it’s also true that the quality of student hasn’t gone up.
>Keep in mind that I attended in the 70s. Nothing stays the same. I have little idea if Caltech is the same today as then, and rather doubt it.
Late 60s, Page, for me. I was lower middle class, which seemed to be the great majority. I recall only one House contemporary who was from serious wealth. Would never have known but for developing a friendship. As you say, I doubt things are similar today.
What house were you in? When I was there, there were huge income disparities between the houses. You may have had that experience in one of the less-well-off houses if you didn't socialize outside of that environment much. There are a lot of rich kids at the school, but it's less pretentious than Harvard or others.
Page, in the 1970s. I did not notice any disparity among the houses. Freshmen were initially assigned to houses at random, and then they'd go through "rotation" where they'd have dinner at each house in turn. After that, the houses would each make a rank of who they wanted, and the freshmen would say yes or no to the selection. I don't recall anyone, ever, talking about their social/wealth background in this process.
> There are a lot of rich kids at the school
They must have hid it well, because I didn't notice any. I never heard anyone mention skiing in Aspen. Nobody had even an upper class car. Nobody had an expensively outfitted dorm room.
As for me, I come from a lower middle class family, and managed to get a modest loan in aid, which I paid off after graduation.
I was one of the richer kids in what was one of the more "bohemian" houses, as another commenter referred to them. Page was actually toward the top of the wealth spectrum when I was there (recently). There was also a lot of wealth disparity within each house, too, by the way.
However, the signals are more subtle than you think. Things like being happy to go out to eat on weekends, having a big wardrobe, having technical toys, and having a car (at all) were all signs of wealth. A few particular sports were also indicators. "Rich people cars" are usually not given to kids in their 20's, even by wealthy parents.
More subtly, there are a lot of social things, like asking what your parents do and asking about your last vacation. Most rich kids know how to read the room enough not to brag about expensive vacations directly, but will ask assuming you recently had one. Having parents who fly in for things and flying out for short vacations is a dead giveaway.
Also, at Caltech in particular, being well-read was a sign of wealth, but I assume that doesn't translate to non-science schools.
And it would never come up in rotation, but certain house cultures just are more attractive to certain types of people. I think that's the source of the disparity, not any sort of rotation-related thing.
At the University of Washington, there are kids with Lambos and Ferraris.
I was well-read, at least in the field of scifi books!
I don't recall anyone's parents flying in or them flying out for vacations. You might see them dropping their kid off at the beginning of the year, or picking them up at the end.
I eventually got a car for my senior year, but it was my beater Mustang from high school I'd rescued from oblivion.
But, just because I didn't notice these things, doesn't mean they weren't there.
At least for the two houses I was in, there were income disparities _within_ each house. It was never much talked about; I only realized it after a couple of years of getting to know individuals better. But I was in two (of the three?) houses with a very bohemian attitude I guess, and very little of our activities involved spending much.
> I wish the obsession with top-tier colleges would go away.
Until the ceiling of utility goes away the obsession wont go away.
If your goal is to climb the corporate ladder, all schools have nearly the same utility. Maybe industry specific, but I contend that its not different enough.
If your goal is to skip the corporate ladder, only top tier schools get you in the room. And only if the pedigree is used in very specific ways. Still not a silver bullet by any means.
But not being there is basically the same as having no ammunition.
I mostly agree, it's a fleetingly small amount of the population for which entering these elite colleges is even a possibility to begin with, what matters to the average Joe is their access to things like community college, tech schools, state schools, and so on.
Sure the elite schools matter because they control access to the levers of mass societal power but it seems to be a MAJORITY of what is talked about which seems disproportionate.
There's tons of people from fairly modest backgrounds in the legal profession, including ones who went to elite law schools. (E.g. Lawrence, Kansas, of all places, is the hometown of not one but two prominent south asian lawyers, Kannon Shanmugam and Judge Sri Srinivasan.) That's the direct result of the LSAT democratizing the legal profession over the last couple of generations.
I suspect you're correct, though, that if Harvard closes those doors, talented people will go to the University of Iowa (my wife's alma mater) and do fine.
It isn't that anyone things that folks from Iowa, going to the nearest in-state State college, can't make it. It happens. It just probably won't, but you might be more comfortable than someone that didn't go. Just don't, say, be a public defense lawyer or be a teacher.
It is that we know that going to places like Harvard, you are much, much more likely to have a well-paying job, comparatively. Bonus points if you are rich and can do things more often with your peers. I'm not under the impression that the education is that much better (it might be, I can't assess that). The networking you definitely seems better. You are getting a foot in the door, a thing that poor families can't always get without a good dose of luck.
In the case of Iowa specifically, the trick (if you can handle the coursework) is to go to Iowa State and major in engineering. They're reasonably affordable and surprisingly high-tier. Quite a few other flyover states that you wouldn't intuitively expect to have really good engineering schools actually do.
(The trouble, of course, is with career paths in which networking and prestige matter a lot more.)
> But if I was ... a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this.
Of course, no one cares about these kids (least of all the elites and their cadre), and any outrage from lower middle class Iowans is already explained away as racism (never mind that Iowa, like much of the rest of middle America, went to Obama in 2008 and 2012).
What's happening to lower middle class kids in Iowa? I'm honestly just confused here. To my knowledge, they're getting decent lower middle class jobs and doing fine. Maybe going off to college and moving to the coast, probably not unless they want to leave. I don't think of that particular group of individuals as disadvantaged, at least not in the context of getting into a good college.
My position is that it’s an injustice if an Ivy-caliber student from a lower-middle class background is denied top educational opportunities because they don’t have the family pedigree of wealthier, more middling students. We would expect upward mobility here, we shouldn’t content ourselves with “at least they’re not getting poorer than their parents”.
People on the coasts and even in the big cities in the Midwest just can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that a lot of us wouldn't be willing to live in New York City or California for all the money in the world. It's not that one lifestyle is inherently better. People have different preferences and it's pretty condescending to think that folks who live in the great plains and don't go to the big name schools are only in that situation for lack of opportunity.
We've got this at my kid's public school. Neighboring school districts don't, but they have two weeks for spring break (Easter) and we have only one. So that works out for me, although I don't much want to go on a vacation that needs two weeks when everyone else is on vacation; it's no fun to go to fun places that are overcrowded.
> This is a simple and effective way of achieving the goals they claim to be championing.
And what are the real goals of these institutions? The whole approach of having artificially limited education where people are sifted into higher and lower status classes based upon judgements made when they're teenagers is premised on elitism, not equity. That's the purpose of these institutions - not to education as many people as possible, but to restrict education to a privileged few in order to increase their own worth. Saying they're concerned about equity is like the casinos that put up signs saying they're concerned about gambling addiction.
There's a reason why Harvard is happy to take people's money and give them an education in the Harvard Extension School, but why they firmly tell those people they can't call themselves Harvard graduates. Contrast this with OMSCS, where they firmly say an in-person degree and an online degree will be the same thing.
To your point, the biggest issue that I see is that elite schools are not growing physically to accept more students. When the eliteness is built on exclusivity versus the quality of the education/graduates that pits admissions of legacy versus new admits.
Its kind of like when Nokia used to sell the mobile phones with gold plating and the only way to get one was via an invite from an influencer. Basically creating the perception of value via false scarcity.
The first elite university school system that can physically expand to multiple campuses to accommodate new in person students and provide them with the exact same quality education and opportunities to network with legacy students will become Apple of collegiate education.
IMHO, the UC school system gets probably closest to this ideal.
The thing is, education doesn't scale infinitely like that. The bigger the class size the less attention you get from the professor, the less individualized the education is, the more generic it has to be, the lower the common denominator, etc.
And lots of colleges are known for their teachers. You can't always just hire another identical teacher: good ones are rare. At elite schools, they are often even famous and individually important in their field. You cannot scale that.
Sure, but when the US population grows by 10% (for example), Shouldn't there be a ~10% increase in elite teachers, allowing for elite colleges to expand hiring by 10%?
Hello I come from a country where a university education is free and the government will support your living costs while you are a student. In that setting, we have too many people in high school and not enough in vocational school (and the local high school is way more academically ambitious than American high school seems to be).
The way our societies & industries still function, too many highly educated people is not the end goal. There's still a long road to grow the percentage of "information workers", especially roles needing higher education, and frankly all that seems to mean is that you outsource all manufacturing to other countries -- I think we've seen lately that wasn't the greatest idea.
> There's a reason why Harvard is happy to take people's money and give them an education in the Harvard Extension School, but why they firmly tell those people they can't call themselves Harvard graduates.
Just wanted to add since I've looked into Harvard Extension School (HES): a HES graduate from a degree program is enrolled in the Harvard Alumni Association and does get to refer to themselves as a "Harvard graduate".
The degree is from the HES with a degree in "Extension Studies", which is the big distinction versus "real" Harvard, but I also suspect that beyond you first or second job, that becomes about as meaningful as your GPA.
Also importantly, that difference has come up in the last few years, to the point where the Harvard College Undergraduate Council and the Harvard Graduate Council both voted last year in favour to remove that differentiation from HES degrees[1]. It is however, Harvard University that has to decide, although it's quite interesting that the students - who are generally considered to be the ones who make the biggest fuss about "real" Harvard - are the ones in support of the move.
It's also worth noting that the child of a HES graduate is still considered a legacy, so that benefit is also conferred on their family.
I have been watching this discussion but wasn’t aware there were recent votes about it. There is a diff between HES and Harvard College, as there should be since they are diff schools at Harvard University. Interestingly enough, something like 1/3 iirc of the classes are exactly the same invluding professor between the two. Pretty sure HES people would be satisfied if they were allowed to just put Harvard University by itself on their diploma or resume.
Some of the public funds come by way of Pell Grants. What's so terrible about poor kids getting a top-tier education?
Other mechanisms are research grants. You don't think it's in the public's interest to incentivize graduate students at top institutions to do socially beneficial research?
Help me understand what your objection is to federal policy, and what you wish federal policy were instead.
Harvard has an endowment worth more than $50B. Harvard grads are the ruling class of our nation, and their system of legacy admissions mean it’s essentially a hereditary system of nobility. This endowment isn’t taxed, and generates huge returns. Its one thing to defend poor kids getting a leg up with federal grants, but I’m not sure the ones who pay for it are the same ones who benefit, and the system seems to be enormously profitable for the private universities.
I noticed you didn't come close to answering the question. Complaining that people who aren't you are making money isn't a good look, and certainly isn't a sound basis for federal public policy.
You indicated a problem with the way federal funds are spent. What section of what federal statute should be changed? In what way should it be changed?
I'll chime in with a suggestion. On average for every dollar of research money that goes to these institutions, another ~$0.70 is given to the bureaucracy to spend as it sees fit. The federal government could cap these rates at 40-50% down from 70% without a significant impact to research, since the research effort, including researcher salaries, are already paid from the direct funds. The bureaucracy will argue that it needs that extra money to keep the lights on, but in practice you see that the middle management tier of universities has expanded as a much higher rate than the research effort, suggesting it is relatively flush with cash compared to the boots on the ground types.
So far you’ve used straw man (you don’t support poor kids going to college?) and an ad-hominem (complaining that people who aren’t you are making money…) attack in your responses, which indicates a lack of argument in good faith.
I spelled out pretty clearly why somebody might have issues with taxpayers subsidizing the tuition of a Harvard graduate.
OP said you opposed federal funding here. Pell Grants are federal funding. Accurate descriptions aren't straw men.
OP expressed disapproval of the fact "that public funds can go to private schools like Harvard."
I tried to guess what OP might mean, but it appears you have found those guesses insulting. So, assuming you think similarly, why don't you just clear it up so we aren't left guessing? What are the specific changes to federal law you propose as an alternative?
It’s not about specific changes to law, it’s about the principle of “Organizations with $50B in the bank probably don’t need federal funds.” Having them put skin in the game with an endowment tax would also be acceptable.
It’s not a straw man when poor kids do literally use federal grant programs to attend Harvard. It’s not a distortion or exaggeration of the original objection that federal monies went to Harvard.
A lot of federal regulation of schools is only present thanks to funding. That means that by giving the school federal funding, the federal government receives some level of control.
Here in India, we have quotas for different kinds of people. There's caste based, Gender based and finally EWS (Economically Weaker Section) Quota. Overall 60% of total seats are reserved for these people.
My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to compete for the non reserved seats.
The point is you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge.
This is off topic, but do you find it difficult seeing this friend the same way while knowing that they and their father gamed the system like that? If I learned this about somebody I knew it would seriously hurt their image in my eyes.
Coming from other side of border but with similar culture and attitudes, corruption is so common in that part of the world that most of the people don’t even see it.
They would consider it smart to game the system.
Only way I can explain this attitude is to compare it tax loopholes in the west. It is very hard for many Americans to see loopholes in tax codes as unethical. Like using mega-backdoor-ira loophole to bypass income limits for contributing to IRA. (Personally, I am not saying that tax loopholes are ethical or unethical, just something that can be seen both ways.)
A suggestion: Judge the parent who did the action, not the child who was along for the ride.
Unless you have some specific knowledge that the child insisted on their parents taking the action, it’s not really fair to blame the child. A lot of children don’t have much choice in the matter at that age.
Atleast in India, everyone "games" systems as much as they can. Those who can't dream about gaming it. The Kafkaesque system makes sure that the few who actually tread the right path are never rewarded [1].
And unlike EU, this benefits corporates/capitalism as they can cut through the red tape easily by "gaming" things.
That sounds like it was designed to be easy to game; income in last two years as a metric rather than total assets, or zip code, or high school attended etc
Yes, it's actually much harder. But the final results are group by category order by rank. There is negative marking to discourage guessing, so the cutoff for certain categories can even be 0 or even negative
So you could make the cut (be considered a successful exam taker) with a zero score just because a large proportion of your peers got negative scores?
This seems just as unhelpful for deciding who to hire or who to allow onto a higher course of study as the campaigns we have seen on some USA university campuses to give all students an automatic A grade.
Note that the system also has many holes, so the categorization isn't perfect. Its possible for a large number of students to belong to the categories only on paper. So you don't even get equity in the end.
I knew a kid in high school whose parents divorced for college financial aid reasons. As long you have a trusting relationship, seems easy enough to divorce, give one spouse the wealth, and then remarry when you don't care about FAFSAs any more.
As a practical matter how would college admissions departments even try to account for "total wealth"? That number doesn't appear on income tax returns. Applicants could write down any number and there wouldn't be any way to verify it short of a court ordered forensic audit.
So then the trust doesn't list you as a beneficiary but instead goes through a series of shell corporations that they don't control on paper. With stakes this high - your very child's future, there are always going to be people that are rich enough to break the spirit of the rules.
If it's a small handful of people, there's probably better things for them to spend time on, rather than trying to make an unbeatable system.
Discrimination against lower castes is very real. There are quota to somewhat compensate for this. Maybe you interpreted it as there being quota for each caste?
Trying to understand, not interpret. Is there law allowing discrimination against lower cases? Or is there law allowing reverse discrimination to redress previous discrimination?
Sorry, I hadn't seen your message. There is a law prohibiting caste-based discrimination. For university admissions there are also quota for low caste, casteless and tribal people, meaning that a certain percentage of places is reserved only for students belonging to those groups
I think you’re missing the point. The really wealthy can just stop receiving income and have enough to draw on from their accumulated wealth. You can start looking at net assets but it’s a cat and mouse game against lots of very well resourced opponents.
> If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.
If you own a large amount of equities you can get a secured loan on those holdings and use it to pay your bills while taking zero salary. This allows folks to live fancy lifestyles without selling holdings and triggering capital gains:
If you put the money mostly into bonds or stocks that don't issue significant dividends, you'll pretty much just have to worry about capital gains (form 1099-B), and those aren't taxed until the fiscal year in which they're realized.
40% for meritocratic entrance is more than twice what is at elite schools in the US. Maybe ambitious Americans should move to India for a fairer chance.
At most US elite schools, less than 20 percent is for “non-reserved” seats. Elite schools reserve seats for sports teams (affirmative action for rich white elites with “sports” like fencing and rowing), legacies (affirmative action for rich white elites), related to professors and school administrators (affirmative action for rich white elites), those who write essays on poverty tourism and their work experience in the NGO/white savior/charity scams (rich white elites), and then regular affirmative action (capped at 20%].
So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.
This is kind of a racist against whites who I think are used as a scapegoat no matter what. In my experience, those sports teams you are talking about are filled up with international and Asian students[1][2]. The dumb white elite student and the extremely talented, poor Asian student stereotypes are not true in my opinion. Maybe they were in the past.
Even the SAT score can be gamed.[3] I think pretty much every admissions advantage that exists is found and exploited. These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead. They are credential factories and students who go these schools have parents that push them from young ages to get in because they want the status credential. I have all sorts of stories about how fake a lot of students CVs are. Fake non profits, doing math competitions despite not liking math, getting into obscure sports, etc. It's absolutely not just white people who do this.
I am not advocating for dropping test scores. I just want to point out how aggressively people pursue getting admitted to elite schools and the specter of cheating hangs over it all too. I have friends who did tutoring in other countries who talk about paid SAT test takers.
>These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead.
This is the arbitrage opportunity for lower-ability legacy students. If the schools provided elite educations, they would chew up and spit out lazy rich kids (and probably generate parental acrimony toward the schools in the process, weakening the donor connections.) As affirmative action of all shapes and sizes creates an ever-expanding group of people most likely to fail who the school is particularly determined to not flunk, there is more safe space for deadweight rich kids (which, for the record, I suspect is an overplayed trope relative to actual prevalance, though probably not hard to find at top-ranked schools.)
First, if that number could be read directly as a refutation of my hypothesis, it would be tied, rather than showing an advantage to the legacy students.
Now, a few guesses: first, to the extent that affirmative action is even partially successful in targeting disadvantaged groups, affirmative action students should be less likely to be legacy, meaning that applications of legacy students should at least reflect a numerical superiority consistent with the strength of the affirmative action bias. Second, I will say that from personal experience I valued, more highly than was deserved, the schools that my parents attended; in this way those schools were the beneficiaries of highly effective advertising, through my parents, that made me more focused on those particular schools than they deserved (so much so that two of the three were two of the four schools I intended to apply to.) The aggregate outcome of that effect across all legacy applicants should be a higher-than-usual applicant quality in the pool of legacy students.
This particular example is just not representative. It does "benefit" whites who are apparently 83% of the athletic quota. The graph is just terribly made. We need not blame or scapegoat whites but at the same time acknowledge that they are the beneficiary
As a contrast, this points out that Asians disproportionately were affected by Stanford's decision to cut varsity sports.[1] This resonates with the experience I have had.
I don't know if whites are generally the beneficiary of student athletic admissions policies at all elite schools although it is complicated because of things like decades old sports from before diversity was a concern and team size. I don't see Harvard cutting long successful teams just to appease non white people but then again they probably would. Also things like the men's football team have a very large roster of 100+ people.
> So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.
I just realized that there are more Appalachians in America than Asian Americans. But how many people have you run into in an elite school with an Appalachian accent? (Or a southern or mid-atlantic, or other lower-tier white accent?)
I can think of exactly one guy: a classmate in electrical engineering courses who was from Kentucky. While you can obviously still find accents in the US, there are lots of reasons why you won't run into that family of accents much. Just about everyone in the US can avoid accents they don’t want by engaging in all forms of audible media, and social climbers and people who move around will avoid strong accents. Those are the same people who will filter to the top of any affirmative action cohort and end up at elite schools.
Maybe the redneck culture of poor Appalachian people is less sticky than the redneck culture of many poor Blacks in the US. My personal anecdotes support that, but then selection bias means they necessarily must.
When I run into guys at work with heavy Appalachian accents, they tend to be heavy machinery mechanics. That's also where I find Black guys who cling to a large amount of Black redneck culture. And those two groups together comprise the supermajority of heavy machinery mechanics at work, come to think of it.
Source: I spent my entire childhood on counties adjacent to what is considered 'Appalachia', and I went to a higher-end college with a significant affirmative action focus on geographic distribution around the US.
This is about right. They want every podunk town to remember that the smartest or most impressive kid in 10 years went (finishing is optional) and they don’t really want more “strivers” than that.
This is a general question for the whole "social justice" movement.
If you're concerned about the wellbeing of black people, and you justify your concern with statistics pointing out that they're disproportionately poor, why not, instead of instituting preferential treatment for black people (which, btw, is racist), you support preferential treatment for poor people instead? That way, you are more efficient (e.g. your resources aren't wasted on Obama's daughters, who are certainly sufficiently privileged already), while also helping people who weren't captured by your superficial assessment ("black <==> poor").
The basic hypotheses for the pro-affirmative action crowd are:
1) Black people are not actually less “good at stuff”, we just have a habit of defining “stuff” in a way that excludes the things that black people are more likely to excel at.
And, 2) Where black people do statistically worse, it’s not due to any innate difference, it’s because socially accepted “normal” support systems are more useful for people with challenges more common in white populations than challenges common in black populations.
So the idea is, if you change the support systems and measures of success to be more universal, the differences will go away.
And then the metric for whether administrative bodies have succeeded in this is “equal outcomes”. What you call “racism”.
But the inferences on which this affirmative action position are based make rational sense. There’s no logical flaw. There’s no conclusive evidence for these hypothesis either, but they are logically plausible.
The opposite perspective is the same: rational, yet lacking any basis in evidence. That is the perspective that black people, through biology, socialization, and/or culture, are actually “worse at stuff”. And the support systems and performance metrics are fair.
There’s no way to prove something is “fair” or “not fair” in the face of “unequal outcomes”. It just comes down to what you want to believe. There’s no rational basis to come to one conclusion or the other.
I choose to believe that all of the big categories of people are pretty similarly “good at things” but I can acknowledge that belief is a leap of faith. The truth is unknowable.
Sorry, but I take offense at this "it is all a matter of opinion and all opinions are equally valid" BS.
1) It is trivially true that if you define your measure right, you can make anyone succeed. For example black people are better at looking like black people. But we try to define "stuff" in a way that correlates with ability to do economically useful tasks. There are excellent reasons to do so.
2) You are ignoring the obvious fact that blacks do NOT get anything like equal treatment. They start with terrible schools, in neighborhoods that are aggressively targeted by police, and grow up with realistic expectations of going to jail that are amply born out by lived experiences. It takes willful blindness and stupidity to ignore that there are excellent reasons why we should expect poor black performance.
Given that the inferences on which this affirmative action position are based require willful blindness and stupidity to believe, there really is a giant logical flaw. It is most emphatically NOT plausible to say that we should expect equal performance from children whose fathers are in jail, whose schools are atrocious, whose neighborhood is dangerous, and who rightly believe that they are being unfairly targeted by police. Both how common these factors are and how important they are to actual outcomes is borne out by extensive research.
The scientific truth is that we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other. The reason being that we have no way to separate out the impact of racism and history from innate ability. Read https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th... if you want a more complete accounting of that fact.
But you do not need to have an opinion on that question to identify many factors that are helping ensure that black kids don't get a fair shake at life. And it is obvious that affirmative action can be at best too little, too late, compared to the things most urgently in need of fixing.
I doubt the funding for black and white students really differs that much. You can find many articles claiming this but a lot of this seems to depend how you count and who is counting. The washington post or NYT will run an article claiming huge gaps, while the heritage foundation says it is broadly equal (https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-di...). Some of the best funded schools in the whole country are black schools. America is littered with failed projects to better minority performance by increasing school expenditures (here is one: https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-most-costly-educati...). The tendency of blacks to go to prison doesn't really seem to have to do with the things you mentioned, at least not solely. For example, young blacks whose parents are in the top 1% of earners, who certainly do not grow up in bad neighbourhoods with terrible schools or targeting by police, seem to commit crime at rates similar to whites from families earning <40,000$/year (raj chetty). And none of this explains how policies that help Nigerians get into Harvard make sense as a means of helping poor American blacks.
In California they certainly do. Schools are mostly funded locally. As a result, there are very large funding gaps. And it isn't just liberal media saying it, https://reason.org/commentary/californias-schools-are-failin... says the same. I can't speak to other states.
That said, there are a lot of ways to throw money at a problem and produce very little in the way of results. The education establishment is very, very good at it.(That would be a rant for another day - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a flavor.)
And about crime, the issue of targeting by police is not necessarily the neighborhood, but the person. When police see someone "who doesn't look like they belong", that person gets targeted. As a result black people in affluent neighborhoods get stopped a lot more than white people in the same neighborhoods. So even if black and white kids are doing bad things in similar amounts, the blacks are going to get arrested for it at a far higher rate.
That the problem is not just limited to one bad police department is shown by a simple statistics. In surveys, blacks and whites do illegal drugs at similar rates. But blacks are arrested and charged for that at several times the rate that whites are. And so the arrest and jail statistics make it look like blacks are doing far more drugs than whites. But our best evidence is arrest records are a very severely racially biased sample of what is actually happening.
That said, I'm mostly in agreement with you on affirmative action. But there is one data point that shows a flaw in your argument. It is easy to argue that policies that helped a half-Kenyan kid get into Columbia for undergraduate and Harvard for law school won't help American blacks very much. But Barack Obama went on to become the first black US President. And the symbolism of that seems to be very important for inspiring US blacks in general. So even though it doesn't seem to me like it should matter, in practice it seems to have.
Re throwing money at a problem and getting no results because of bad administration of funds---this is definitely what we have been doing in education and we should stop. Arguments to give more money to the same people to do the same things are going to go poorly with increasingly large amounts of the broader populace--this may not stop the government from doing it though.
I am not going to pretend to know the details of California school funding. But broadly speaking schools which get less local funding usually get more funding from state and federal sources. And the national average per pupil differences between the poorest and richest school districts are really not that large, but these numbers are very tricky (much more spent in nyc than idaho, etc.). Some anecdotes: recently there was a viral video of a school in Indiana, I think Carmel. Everyone was very impressed by the school facilities and it seemed to confirm the prior that rich kids get more funds. But then it turned out the average spending per pupil at that school is less than half the per pupil spending of DC public schools. Now there may be good reasons DC would spend more (COL etc.), but even adjusting for that the spending wouldn't be that different. Carmel just spends the money better. Anecdote 2: I have taught school in rural areas at schools which are absolutely poor in terms of facilities and everything else. I don't think tripling the spending per student would have done anything at all to change outcomes there...the students could usually not make it through a 40 min lesson without attacking each other or totally disrupting things. No reasonable amount of money would have changed this. It is not that expensive to educate a kid, you just need to feed them and teach them things that have been known for hundreds or thousands of years from old books. What is going wrong, I think, does not have to do with differences in school funding.
I think Obama's legacy is yet to be understood. Something like "the inspirational power of the symbol of a black president" is difficult to measure. The worsening race relations and their societal impacts (and their causes) since he took office is also hard to measure. Im curious what your evidence is to say "it seems very important for inspiring US blacks in general". Inspiring them to do what? And how is this quantified? (I guess by asking people "who is your hero" or something).
Sitting at my son's IEP meetings with a roomful of expensive professionals who documented all of the ineffective things that they were doing was eye-opening. I pulled him from public school and put him in a private school that specialized in children with lack of executive function (primarily ADHD and autistic). For a cost of about half the per student average in the school he was in (where he had cost far more than average) he got real help. He went from there to a college prep school that is far more academically rigorous than public schools, at similar per capita cost.
He is doing far better than public schools could have done, in a much more cost effective way.
On minority schools, a big part of the problem isn't funding. For many good reasons, schools in bad districts see very high turnover. As a result their teachers tend to be inexperienced. Plus there is the whole disrupted classroom issue, which is much worse in a tough neighborhood.
And about Obama, statistics do not support his having made lives better for blacks in general. But he's still cited as an inspiration a whole lot. And his success seems to have inspired other blacks to try to perform at the top level. Including our current vice president. So he seems to have become a useful symbol.
Your tone seems disagreeing, but I think your second to last paragraph is making the same point I’m making?
I agree with you that it’s not fair, I’m just acknowledging that the adjudication of fairness happens outside the reach of science. It’s a matter of values not evidence.
The second to last paragraph supports a minor point you made.
But the others contradict most of what you said. The pro-affirmative action position that you outlined requires willful blindness and stupidity to accept. It is very emphatically not equally valid to the alternatives.
There may be better arguments for accepting affirmative action as valid. But that one is terrible.
> And it is obvious that affirmative action can be at best too little, too late, compared to the things most urgently in need of fixing.
This argument is at least 40 years old and twice as tired. Richard Rodriguez was plying this in the late 80s, and the anti-affirmative action squad in Cali in the 90s.
It is not "too little too late", it is "better late than never". The disadvantages of background usually crop up as crippling impostor syndrome, which can be helped with the right reinforcement, but the idea that "fathers in jail" or "police brutality" in somebody's background invalidates their access to a higher education is a cop out at best.
The main thing this apologism hides is the inescapable fact that mediocrity + centrality wins every time. Look at any school and you will see the folks with "the right background" making it through. Meanwhile, you will also see those from the challenged backgrounds you describe often dropping out and _not_ because of grades but because the whole environment screams "you don't belong here".
Given that I said we have no data that can begin to address this question, it is at best disingenuous. Because how can I offer a test without data?
It is true that all of world history is data, but it is not necessarily data that can answer any particular question. The problem is the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Both genetics and environment are important to IQ. Both generally affect IQ through long, convoluted, and poorly understood reasons of cause and effect. Therefore we can establish evidence of differences, but can't necessarily distinguish between theories about the causes of those differences.
What would make a difference is a theory of mechanism. For example it is uncontroversial that people with ancestry from Nigeria are better at sprinting, and people with ancestry from Kenya are better at long distance running. For this we can identify specific facts about body type that help with sprinting versus long distance running, and we can identify strong evidence that these body type differences are due to genetics.
But we have no such theory of mechanism that can be applied to IQ. And therefore the mass of data we have about the existence of differences does not distinguish between potential causes of said differences.
> For example it is uncontroversial that people with ancestry from Nigeria are better at sprinting, and people with ancestry from Kenya are better at long distance running.
World class sprinters have an over-representation of individuals descended from a specific region of Nigeria - you can't generalize that to "Nigerians sprint faster than Europeans",or "Black people sprint faster than white people" the way people do with IQ. It is also prudent to note that Kenya has a whole ecosystem nurturing long distance runners; with a wealth of scouts, academies, and trainers available to the young who show some talent, so ascribing Kenyan's prowess to nature alone is incorrect.
Nutrition and IQ are correlated independent of race; especially early-childhood nutrition. Standardized testing is further compounded by test prep and tutors (proxy for wealth). Wealth in a family correlates to parents' education level. The lack of education in older African Americans has an obvious historical explanation. Most black Americans are descended from slaves from West Africa, but don't do as well as recent West African immigrants - 29% of Nigerian-Americans have advanced degrees; more than any other immigrant group. The vast chasm between the academic outcomes of two groups that are both largely of west African descent disproves "nature" is the sole determinant of poor outcomes for African Americans.
No. That there are differences in thinking speed is verifiable.
We can also verify that differences in thinking speed between individuals has a large component due to genetics, and also another large component due to environment. Everything from diet to the quality of parental interactions in early childhood.
What we can't determine is to whether genetics contributes to the differences in thinking speed between groups of people. We can identify important environmental factors like culture and racism. We can show that environmental facts matter. For example children of mixed race couples have a higher average IQ if they have white mothers. But nobody has found a way to measure what difference genetics might or might not make.
>The scientific truth is that we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other. The reason being that we have no way to separate out the impact of racism and history from innate ability.
I'm sorry but this is blatantly false. "Innately better" is a vague and inflammatory term, but if you define the measure, we can use straightforward statistical techniques to find correlations.
Simple example: East Africans outperform others in long-distance running. In sprinting, west Africans outperform.
We can separate confounders out because we have large data sets. You don't have to just try to compare populations as a mass. We can, for example, look at performance only of black people raised in white families. Or rich black people. Or white people raised in black families. Etc.
Taking the example of IQ, which is the most important statistical measure in these discussions, we can also look at poor populations with high IQ, like Jews (at certain historical times) or various groups of people from East Asia. Vietnamese boat people are a great comparison. It has to be explained how they were so successful despite facing the very similar or arguably worse challenges (e.g. holocaust) as other population groups.
Or look at subgroups of black people, like Nigerian immigrants to America, who have generally better social outcomes than average whites.
All this has been studied to death for decades and many conclusions are well-supported by statistics (at least as well-supported as lots of noncontroversial findings).
Separating out confounders is easier said than done. When you look at the performance of black people raised in white families they are still exposed to media, teachers, and peers who have expectations of them based on appearance. Even with that population, racism remains a confounder.
Likewise while you can look at historical Jews as a poor population with high IQ, you have the confounder that even then Jews placed a strong cultural value on education and intelligence. And therefore, even while they were poor, Jews were likely to work to improve themselves on both. Therefore this leaves open the question of how much of the difference is due to this cultural factor versus innate genetics.
In the case of Vietnamese boat people, we have families that literally risked their lives for a chance at a better future. This attitude taken to a new country suggests that we should expect them to make the most of any opportunity that they can find. How much of their subsequent success is due to this attitude?
On Nigerian immigrants, I'd need to see a source to believe your "generally better social outcomes" comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans puts the 2018 median household income for members of the Nigerian diaspora into the USA at $68,658. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26... the median household income for white non-Hispanic households at $70,642. At least on the easiest to check social outcome, whites are still doing better.
That said, Nigerians who arrive here tend to be motivated and well-educated. I'm not sure how you can distinguish that from genetics. Doubly so since the poster child for racist claims about IQ is the poor performance of US blacks. Blacks whose African ancestry includes a significant share of Nigerian.
So yes, we can cite volumes of statistics. And it is easy for find lots of books like The Bell Curve that actually do. But when you dig in you won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to genetics rather than some cultural factor.
You won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to cultural rather than some genetic factor either.
This is an isolated demand for proof. At the level of proof you're demanding, basically nothing can be said about anything in terms of social science one way or the other. There are basically never 'single statistics' that are isolated from all alternative explanation.
Instead, one should apply the same standards and skepticism to all hypotheses. In this case, both for and against genetic/cultural explanations.
(Even so, "you won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to genetics rather than some cultural factor" is untrue; differences in athletic performance satisfy this demand.)
If culture flowed from genetics, then we would not expect to see the very large cultural shifts that history documents time and again in rather short periods of time.
Elizabethan England was incredibly bawdy by all accounts. And yet the same country a few centuries later was Victorian England, one of the most sexually uptight societies on record. Genetics didn't change that much, how did that happen?
Germany from the mid-1800s through WW 2 was one of the most warlike societies imaginable. Germany since has turned into a country of peaceniks with no interest in invading anyone, and who are unable to even cough up what they promised for self-defense. How did that happen?
The truth is that while factors from genetics to parasites like toxoplasma can impact culture, culture changes far too rapidly to be dismissed as simply an outcome of genetics.
I think it is more likely that culture drives genetics. If you have a group whose culture favors intermarriage, where marriage is encouraged and even arranged between families with intellectual success, and which enables the resulting couples to have many children, that would tend to drive the genetics of the group.
The logic of this comment is that there is somewhere a celestial point tally system that accumulates the genetic trauma of past generations, catapulting Jewish people to the top of the leaderboard for their racial experience of the Holocaust, and giving the lie to argument that generations of ongoing discrimination --- redlining ended within some of our lifetimes! --- and low SES conditions for disfavored minorities has any impact on their scholastic performance.
It is, to put it mildly, not at all well established how SES and assessed intelligence interact.
But then Asians come along and outperform whites at the supposedly racist metrics. So much so that whites require affirmative action policies like Legacy Athletics and Dean's List. Simultaneously defeating both white supremacist arguments as well as anti-merit ones
The logic of reparations does not require poverty on the part of the victim.
It requires acknowledgement of an injustice, and a requirement that the perpetrator has to make good on it. In the case of blacks we have forcible capture, slavery, a variety of discriminatory laws and policies, lynchings, and so on. There is no shortage of historical wrongs done to blacks that were never meaningfully made up for.
So far, so good. However the logic runs into some major problems. First of all, what are the rights of current blacks to reparations due to the wrongs done to their ancestors? Second, how do we identify the perpetrators who need to owe repayment? Third, is it fair to punish those descendants now for the actions of ancestors that they do not know? And fourth, what reparation would be sufficient?
My personal position is as follows.
First, if we extend to one group reparations for wrong past, we have to extend this to all groups. That way lays insanity. I'm half Irish. My ancestors were targeted by the KKK for being Catholic, targeted by the English over centuries for being Irish, and escaped to the USA from an entirely preventable famine. Every ethnic group can rehearse its own story of victimhood, and the act of doing so primarily harms those groups again.
Second, identifying perpetrators is hard. For example American blacks are more likely to be descended from slaveholders than the average white American. I grew up in poverty and there were no slaveholders in my ancestors for at least the last 200 years. I don't think it is fair to ask me to pay for the crimes of other people's ancestors.
Third, holding people accountable for the actions of their ancestors crosses the line into collective punishment. Collective punishments of all kinds are considered human rights violations, no matter how strong the rationale. See https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v2/rule103 for a list.
Fourth, no one-time cash reparation can make up for the ongoing problems that we continue to inflict on black communities. Therefore rather than focusing on the justices or injustices of such reparations we should focus on fixing what we continue to do wrong in the present. Of which, unfortunately, there is no shortage.
Things that your forefathers suffered, may be 6 to 10 generations before you. Can you name one thing which directly or indirectly affects you today because of their sufferings?
Slavery was that long ago.
White's were sold as slaves in North Africa before black slaves where brought to America. Even white women were sold as sex slaves and they used to call them "White Gold". ( You can search for term "White Gold Slavery")
Do whites also get reparations?
Additionally nobody talks about modern day slavery, which are sex slaves. There are millions of women stuck in that trade who were forced in to it against their will and they cannot leave.
I can trace behavioral patterns back 4 generations in my own family. And the only reason I can't go farther is that I have never talked to anyone who knew my great great grandparents. (Which would be difficult given that they were born in the 1800s and died before my birth.)
However, regardless of whether there is an impact, EVERY ethnic group has severe trauma in its past. And you generally don't have to go back more than a century or two to find it. The best thing to do is fix our present, and try to create a better future. Which, globally, we've generally been doing at a breathtaking pace.
Albeit with important exceptions. Such as problems that teenage girls began having with mental health starting about 10 years ago. Which may be tied to social media applications.
I think the logical conclusion of this argument is that reparations should be paid for from a wealth tax? (as opposed to the likely default of "from general revenue")
I agree with this, and have been working to get this implemented at the large bank I work for. Being from a lower socio-economic background cuts across diversity characteristics and makes life a lot harder.
College educationally various outreach efforts are targeted to first generational students (those most likely to not have knowledge about how to maneuver the educational system). Unfortunately this leaves some holes, as not all student with parents who went to college know how to maneuver the system.
Basically whatever metric you choose will leave gaps. And if you try to universally implement a system you get other negative effects (from cost, to information overwhelm, to non-adaptability).
If you ban legacy, then you lose needed donations. If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else. There is a net benefit for everyone when there are academically challenged wealthy children. Just keep standardized testing to prevent mass arbitrary admissions that will inevitably become racist.
> If you ban legacy, then you lose needed donations. If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else.
Or the universities could spend a bit less money. Most donations go to things that aren't exactly central to the supposed mission of a university, like football fields or $90 million dining halls [1]. The explosion of administrative staff over the last couple decades also doesn't help.
> If you lose donations, then costs go up for everyone else.
Aren't costs going up for everyone else anyway? Hot take: instead of hoping that rich alumni would donate to universities, the nation could tax these folks properly instead, and use that money make public education free/cheap.
There are quite a few countries in the world doing this, not all of them rich.
In many countries with a single-payer health system all or some of the hospitals providing care are private. One could imagine a similar single-payer education system where some of institutions providing education are private too.
None of these (and other) schools view endowments as something to spend. It must always be growing to show how amazing and great the school is.
I remember how during the pandemic there was a number of articles about how these schools might have to take out some small pittance of the endowment to fund certain things and the schools were all doom and gloom about it.
Many endowments pay the salary of the fundraisers at major universities, in fact. And legacy gifts are usually set up for "forever" scholarship, where, say 5000 bucks is available for a certain type of student each semester forever, because the gift to the school was large enough that they know investing it will make at least enough to cover the cost.
So no, endowments aren't spent, but the returns fund a lot of stuff.
It is the SI prefix for giga, and commonly used instead of B for "Billions" outside of the US when writing "Harvard's endowment fund is currently worth fifty-three billion US dollars".
This is not the reason ivy's have legacy. They have legacy students because that's what makes them the most prestigious universities in the world. Legacy students will succeed no matter what due to their connections. They will become rich and powerful, and networking with the rich and powerful is the main value add that ivy's are providing. Without legacy admits ivy's would be no different from Berkeley or ucla.
We don't need rich people to all piling in to donate to the top schools. Have them donated to the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th tier schools.
Encouraging donation to top schools via legacy admission creates a perverse incentive to concentrate resources at a few top schools, creating the cycle of everyone fighting to get into them. Money and resources should be spread out.
I like a alternate version of this: tax 25% of all donations to schools (all of them, top or not), and redirect the money to fund and improve quality of public universities.
You still have a strong incentive for folks who want to show gratitude to their alma mater, and at the same time help improve access and equity to everyone else.
I think that's a joke of an argument. The people whose kids would no longer get in would go somewhere and the distribution of their bribery would surely be more democratizing.
Did you not read the part where the ‘aristocracy’ pays way more tuition money for their one child? If you weren’t so focused on class warfare, you’d realize all of that extra money can be used for other things such as scholarships for families who wouldn’t be able to afford a university education for their children. The people you’re referring to wouldn’t be able to afford tuition before the rate hikes, and they sure would be in a worse position post tuition hike
That money could just as easily pay for scholarships at public colleges. Why is it important that they donate to generational private schools instead of public?
> Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game
Learning disabilities give unlimited time on the tests. That means you can slowly use brute force on the math section to check each alternative one by one instead of needing to be good at other techniques.
Harvard had something like 25% of admitted students do this. Does it sound plausible that 25% of Harvard students need unlimited time on the test due to a learning disability and that lower tier schools have lower rates of learning disabilities, or more plausible that Harvard students have more access to sympathic doctors (through family relations, upper/upper midle class organization connections) and savvy admissions advisers?
The system of accommodating learning disabilities is a grift, I had a few while always being a strong tester who tended to finish tests early. The “accommodation” I always got was extra time which was extremely baffling. Extra time in particular was given out like candy for no reason. Harvard students having learning disabilities that warrant extra time on tests is a fucking joke, how delusional must one be to think that those admitted into Harvard are MORE disabled than most students at learning?
Why is somebody deemed somebody to have a weakness in learning in one particular area that makes them “learning disabled”? Why aren’t students who just aren’t as smart as other students considered “learning disabled” and given extra time on tests? But if you’re called dyslexic or dysgraphic or have dyscalculia you’re disabled and deserve not just accommodations (Which I wouldn’t be opposed to on balance) but extra time on every test even if on the whole you smoke the other students?
They are beyond questioning and any teacher who does is likely to have their heads chopped off for hating and not believing disabled people despite not being an expert in disability. Which pretends these accommodations were given out in the first place due to some rigorous criteria by experts in disability.
Learning disabilities are a type of neurodevelopmental disorder in which a student that is of otherwise average of above average intelligence struggle with a specific type of material, commonly reading (dyslexia) or basic math (dyscalculia). The most effective treatment is early remediation, in which students in primary education are identified and given extra lessons and exercises on their weakness to help make them more well rounded so they do not struggle later in their education. This is super effective.
I can tell your frustrated with accommodations. I think your arguments against accommodations would be a lot stronger if you knew more about them. I think you might have some good points inside, but your frustration and ignorance prevent them from being compelling. I encourage you to do more reading, but let me point out a few mistakes in your post.
* You seem to mistakenly associate a learning disability with low intelligence. A person cannot have a learning disability and be below average in intelligence by definition. Struggling to learn how to read while being average or above average in every other subject is different than strugglingly to learn everything. The more a student struggles to learn to read while excelling at everything else, the more likely they are to be diagnosed. This means very intelligent students with a learning disability are more likely to be diagnosed than average students with the same disability.
* Extra time on test is an accommodation.
* Accommodations are not being handed out like candy for no reason. Anyone can buy candy. Accommodations require a documented disability.
* Many standardized test accommodations are very appropriate, such as blind people being offered a braille version of the test, or people with poor motor control having someone else physically fill in scantron bubbles.
* A student can be disabled based on low intelligence. It's not called a learning disability, because it's fundamentally a different thing.
That is not how it works in the real world. Affluent parents go doctor shopping to get learning disability diagnoses for their children. This has been going on for decades (I saw it with some of my classmates when I was in school) and the friendly doctors are well known in those circles.
I am not claiming that learning disabilities aren't real or that students who legitimately have those conditions don't deserve some accommodations. But the reality is that the current system is totally broken and discriminatory.
Hi anxiety higher status parents (professors, doctors, etc.) with kids who aren't Einstein go doctor shopping and waste district time constantly to get their kids testing advantages even though their kids are often totally typical kids with 110ish IQs. Special Ed at the local district is sick of them because it wastes so much time and money and takes away resources from the kids who actually need. (Though many of these parents do cause their kids to develop actual real anxiety disorders...)
>A person cannot have a learning disability and be below average in intelligence by definition.
Very aware of this, which essentially means that learning disabilities are a privilege for kids who are ALREADY ADVANTAGED over the other students, and yet a child with a 120IQ and dysgraphia gets to take 50% more time on their test than a kid with 80IQ basically without question, and if they press the issue they can probably get double time. That's my main issue. You need to be below 70IQ typically to be considered to have an intellectual disability.
You know, because that's fair. It's an "accommodation" for a student who has already gotten higher grades than another student to one day be pulled into a doctors office, have it explained that they have this horrible problem, and now get 50% more time on tests than somebody they were already a solid grade point ahead of, a child who statistically we can predict will live their entire lives with higher socioeconomic status and higher quality of life already!
When I noticed how a student who always got worse grades than me, who got no accommodations, I always saw him studying after school in the library and eventually realised "he must he here this every day for hours" I felt "wow this system is so fucking fair - because I lack ability, unlike him who definitionally cannot have a learning disability as he's below average intelligence, so he needs to do a harder version of the tests that I do".
Extra time on exams especially a ridiculous number like 50% is the more ridiculous accommodation in all but the most extreme cases. I got 50% extra time for dysgraphia when I was leaving tests with written essay portions early - maybe to be fair it could have taken me say 20% extra time to write. Also - despite my issues being specific to handwriting - I still got the same accommodation for computerised exams! What a fair and balanced accommodation only an ignorant person would question. I was diagnosed with a disability by a doctor so the accommodation HAS to make sense ten years later in a totally different context!
Also want to add that getting a formal certificate for learning disabilities is expensive. From what I heard, an ADHD test costs a couple of thousand USD, which could mean a lot to low income families.
I actually think this suggests it would be beneficial to just eliminate time limits on standardized tests. There is no inherent need to make time pressure the hard part of the exam. I’ve always thought it reflects a kind of laziness in the test design, and establishes a metric (thinking fast/under pressure) that isn’t really well aligned with the traits that help the most in real academic pursuits.
I am glad someone pointed this out. I don't know the percentage but a lot of students game their GPA in school too. From pushing professors to give group assignments to using mental health days to claiming to have learning disabilities, these are all tools they have including cheating. Professors don't usually change their homework assignments every time they offer a course and online sites sell the answers. Professors know but they can't risk giving students below an A-. It causes a shit storm.
I used to think standardized tests were the way to go, but...
My kid recently went through another testing gauntlet, which is the 11+ test. For those who aren't in the Southeast corner of the UK, this is a multiple choice type test that looks a lot like an IQ test in some ways. It's a single sitting and determines whether you are allowed into something called a Grammar School, which is just a selective school, and the test is taken the year the kid turns 11.
So the thing about this test is that nobody will admit to it, but everyone in the middle class will hire tutors to help their kids pass the test. Furthermore, private primary schools will spend a lot of time prepping for this test in the two years before the kids take the test. Plenty of people do both: send their kids to a fee-paying primary school, and pay for tutors.
Guess what, the pass rate for fee-paying (aka independent) schools is way higher than for state schools. It's hard to break down which parents went for state + tutoring, but it's not exactly a stretch to suppose those kids did better than state school kids with no tutoring. Furthermore state schools that do well tend to be in certain wealthy areas.
If you have a look at one of these tests, it's pretty clear you benefit from practicing. Like just about any test, if you've done it before you are at an advantage, the more the better.
I don't see how this isn't gaming the test. The idea with a test is to uncover which kids will get the most out of the selective school, but how is that going to work when a select few are prepped for the test?
Now just for the record I did the SAT back when I was a kid. It's pretty much the same as the 11+, for a slightly older age group. Again, it doesn't make any sense to say it's hard to game. People are gaming it as we speak.
I think what might actually be hard to game is teacher recommendations. After all these people have been with the kid for a long time and know what they can do. They also tend to be distanced enough that they don't have to say good things about every kid.
I think what might actually be hard to game is teacher recommendations. After all these people have been with the kid for a long time and know what they can do. They also tend to be distanced enough that they don't have to say good things about every kid.
When I was 11, I had a teacher lean over during class and tell me how much she didn't like me, that I was the laziest student she had ever had, and that she couldn't wait until the end of the year because she wouldn't have to see me any more. To be fair: I wasn't a horrible student, was usually quiet without many friends, and just wasn't at the point to handle 2-3 hours of homework, probably due to undiagnosed issues.
I learned that teachers don't always have your best interests at heart, and I couldn't trust any of them much. I couldn't imagine the stress of trying to impress teachers to the point of getting recommendations, and I can't imagine she'd have given me one and I probably would have been scared to ask the others after that. On the other hand, it also became quite clear that you could game the system a little if you got the teachers to like you.
Just because they don't have to say good things about every kid doesn't mean that all of them will say things that give a fair assessment, though a lot would try a little more than this woman did.
Yeah this is something I thought about quite hard before I moved countries. I didn't want my kid to be at the mercy of some teacher who might not like him.
So then I ended up where we have this one time test, which stresses the hell out of everyone. Luckily he did well on it, school decisions came out last week and he got what he wanted.
I'm not actually sure which is better, part of why I thought maybe teacher recommendations would have been better was that my kid would undoubtedly get recommended if that were the system, he just happens to have that thing that teachers recognise. But even so he could have had a bad day and not made it in the system we actually live in.
How is hiring a tutor "gaming" it? They spend extra time learning, and as a result they do better. It's not like the tutors secretly give them a cheat sheet list of all the test answers; they still have to answer the questions the same as everyone else. If somebody puts more time into studying, whether on their own or with a tutor or with their parents, they'll do better than somebody who didn't.
Prepping for a test doesn't give you any practical knowledge or expand how you think about things; it's just about getting familiar with the test’s format and the way the question authors think. It'd be a bit like getting “better” at poker by always playing with the same people and learning their tells. It's “gaming” it because you're not better at what the test is supposed to measure, you're just better at what it actually does measure.
Prepping for the test is a valuable signal when you're talking about the entire pool of high school students. And it does not gate opportunities by economics as much as you'd think: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/magazine/asian-test-prep-.... Immigrant families eligible for reduced price lunch are able to scrounge up the money for these tests.
Give ten kids from the same class a self study online course and give another ten a private tutor, and they won't see the same score distribution. Where's the signal there?
SAT results don't have a line item that notes the amount of wealth or privilege that went into preparing.
> Immigrant families eligible for reduced price lunch are able to scrounge up the money for these tests.
Some families can't. Other families aren't aware, or aren't interested. But we judge the kids in the family for that.
That said... I don't know how the _new_ system will work at fighting that privilege -- there are still lots of ways for it to disguise itself. But we have to at least acknowledge the issues with the SAT.
But, to me at least, this goes beyond privilege. This is about diversity of skills and diversity of learner profiles and moving away from linear quantification of potential.
The effects of studying "for the test" as you put have been measured, improved test taking skills tends to be worth ~30 points which is not that significant. This matches my anecdotal experience and that of people I know who run SAT prep courses.
It's far more effective to actually teach students the material, either by teaching them new concepts or by firming up their understanding to ones they've already been exposed to. Particularly in Math, many students in high school have shaky understandings of fractions or algebra. Firming up these foundations can often lead to >100 point increase (given sufficient lead time). Those foundations are something the test is actually looking for since numeracy and strong algebra skills are a strong predictor of success in Calculus.
It's true that tutoring grants unfair advantages but this is going to be true in any system that uses skills as part of a selection criteria.
> The effects of studying "for the test" as you put have been measured, improved test taking skills tends to be worth ~30 points which is not that significant. This matches my anecdotal experience and that of people I know who run SAT prep courses.
I see this often but I suspect that it is lumping "Took a prep class for 1 hour on a Saturday" and "Spent 6 hours a week for 52 weeks with a tutor" in the same category.
Any tutor who only gets a 30 point increase won't be seeing much business among the folks I know.
However, I do agree with you that firming up skills is a remarkably quick way to get a significant boost. Being able to add 2 + 2 and come up with 4, repeatedly and accurately is often a big deal on these tests even with a calculator.
I'm familiar with that 30 point differential because it shows up in research.
You're right that 30 points isn't that much if you're thinking about the whole distribution, but I guarantee it can be significant around the selection threshold. That threshold might be implicit or explicit, but it's there, and if it's enough to nudge applicants past it, it's significant.
Sure, but having read a large chunk of educational literature I'm not aware of any alternatives with fewer distortions from parental aid. Grades correlate more highly with a good home life than test scores do, for example.
As long as we have "prestige" universities there's going to be some form of skills testing, and no one has ever designed an un-gameable test that can be administered nationally. The question we have to ask ourselves then is how we can reduce game-ability and I doubt we can make improvements that are more than incremental.
The JEE solved this problem by changing the format of the test each year. It's not disclosed before the exam. So it is really hard to form meaningful strategy that consistently helps you
> That said... I don't know how the _new_ system will work at fighting that privilege -- there are still lots of ways for it to disguise itself. But we have to at least acknowledge the issues with the SAT.
I'm in favor of using tests like that SAT as cheaper diagnostic tests, to help with student placements and accommodations, not for admissions. It's too bad this is being lost with the removal of the testing requirements, but I guess it doesn't matter much as the tests were never used this way in the first place, despite providing this information. https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ACT%20Paper%20... (note that I don't agree with the conclusions of this paper, merely the identified diagnostic criteria)
> This is about diversity of skills and diversity of learner profiles
I might believe that if I didn't believe that the diversity would mostly be token, with the majority of students in selective schools fitting a handful of templates.
> I think what might actually be hard to game is teacher recommendations. After all these people have been with the kid for a long time and know what they can do. They also tend to be distanced enough that they don't have to say good things about every kid.
How can you compare recommendations from different teachers? The whole point of the SAT is that it is a single number: you can compare SAT results from different schools and see which children are better at taking the test.
> If you have a look at one of these tests, it's pretty clear you benefit from practicing. Like just about any test, if you've done it before you are at an advantage, the more the better.
Yes, but you can't get from 500 to 1500 by practicing. You can probably get from 1450 to 1500, but that's just a few practice sessions to learn what the questions look like, how to fill in the answer sheet, how to tackle the most common ones.
If you’re trying to gauge what students will get the most from special schooling, the ones who prepped and studied for the test are probably the ones who are going to do the same if afforded the special school.
Teacher recommendations are incredibly easy to game. I asked my teachers for recommendations and, to help jog their memory and for their convenience, provided them a sample letter of recommendation that I wrote. They could sign and send that one, use the content as a reminder to write their own, or start from scratch.
I’m quite sure that money or services have changed hands for a recommendation in the past, probably more frequently than stand-ins have taken standardized tests.
Wouldn't teacher recommendations just leave to bribery? And not even that expensive. Have the kid deliver some nice present before each suitable occasion. Maybe brown envelope with cash.
At least with tests you could release previous tests and then possibly some groups could release free instructions on key points or tactics.
Teacher recommendations is how the U.K. used to work. It might be interesting to see what the arguments were at the time, though grammar schools feel like they’ve been a hot topic for quite a long time now.
I don’t think teacher recommendations are great. Presumably parents who currently pay for test prep will instead throw money at getting good teacher recommendations through the right schools, teaching good manners, etc. If I look at my mother and her sister, one went to the grammar school and the other didn’t because they had gotten a new headmistress who didn’t really know the students. The grammar school stopped being selective after a few years anyway (did I mention that grammar schools have been a hot topic for a long time…) and I think the teachers struggled with the change. Perhaps another difference is that grammar schools are often single-sex which I think has a bunch of benefits and drawbacks.
>I think what might actually be hard to game is teacher recommendations. After all these people have been with the kid for a long time and know what they can do. They also tend to be distanced enough that they don't have to say good things about every kid.
Recommendation letters aren't worth a lot. Most kids who have a shot at getting into a top-ranked school surely have some teachers they got along with. But then there's the luck of the draw whether said teacher will also put in an effort beyond a pro-forma recommendation.
I live in the southeast of the UK and my daughter took the 11+ and passed. She also went to a private prep school.
Private schools don't give as much 11+ help as you would think - if a child passes the 11+, the private lose all the potential senior school fees.
Tutoring for the exam definitely helps, but it's mostly exam technique and practise on those types of logical reasoning questions. They can't do the questions for you.
Well if you look at the scores, about 25% of a year group passes the test. It's something like 16% of state school kids and 36% of independent schools. Unfortunately the guy who compiled these stats closed down his website, so it's not so easy for me to look up.
The variation is enormous though. My kid's school is boasting about 95% of their kids passing the test. I know they've been prepping the test because well, that's what the kid has been doing for past couple of years.
> if a child passes the 11+, the private lose all the potential senior school fees.
It's true that some schools try to discourage the kids from taking it for that reason, but of course that's only true if there's a senior school section.
In the Netherlands, teacher advice (based on standardized tests)is the way. They really restrict practice for the test in multiple ways, some legal and some cultural.
Interestingly, the Netherlands tried it a few years without the results of the standardised tests being known to the teacher (the results came in after they'd given their advice). It turned out that children from a poor background started getting worse recommendations...
As a result that practice has been reversed and teachers now use the result from the standardised test again when making their recommendation.
> Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack. All this talk about equity is the most convenient and cost-effective way to eliminate the one barrier that most vexes rich parents.
It's also a good way to sneak in affirmative action (racial discrimination really) in places where voters and taxpayers repeatedly said no, like in the UC system, since it removes an objective measure and leaves more "holistic" criterions an admission committee can use to accept or deny (without giving out any explanation) a candidate. [0]
Allowing Rich kids in. THISSSSSSS!!!! is what it was always about.
It amazes me how corrupt higher education is now. It is AMAZINGLY corrupt.
There is this thing with getting old (I'm in late 40s now) where you think the world is going to hell, but really what is happening is that you are figuring out EXACTLY how fucked up everything is.
However, sometimes things really are going to hell (increasing rich/poor divide, environment/global warming, vast increase in higher ed/healthcare/housing relative to inflation).
Anyway, in this case, I still am trying to gauge if my fondness for the general institution of higher education circa late 1990s was actually still somewhat deserved at the time and it has _truly_ fallen apart in the next 25-30 years, or if it was this bad for the last 40-50 (I can argue there's a good chance it was a great institution in the 1960s fresh after post-WWII investment in higher ed by the gubberment).
Anyone have thoughts? I personally think it is ACTUALLY worse, that the rise of the huge administrator/MBAs in higher ed has led to do-anything-for-a-buck, and it REALLY is this bad.
Signs that it actually is bad:
- the stupendous rise in cost / that little student loan crisis we have
- the stupendous rise in Div I coaching salaries and facilities
- the amount of frivolous facilities built
- the rise of the minimum wage adjunct professor
- the decline of import of tenure (revenue/publishing/research is now everything)
- the decline of humanities. I still as a science guy look down at them, but they are historically important (as in over 1000s of years) to educational institutions.
- grade inflation, it is pay for degree even in some Ivies it appears now
> There is this thing with getting old (I'm in late 40s now) where you think the world is going to hell, but really what is happening is that you are figuring out EXACTLY how fucked up everything is.
This is so true. When I was younger I thought "oh what a cynical thought, I should cheer up and be less gloomy". Now I realize I was right. The sheer amount of waste arising from badly managed orgs with wrong incentives is just enormous. This is why we don't have flying cars and teleporters.
If you consider that universities these days let in a lot more people, it's inevitable that the academic level is lower. Back in the day someone doing a phd had a reasonable chance of becoming a professor. Now there's so many people the university is not really for producing knowledge, that's just a side business to giving a stamp of approval to your average middle class kid who is not gonna be doing research.
No one wants to tell children they aren’t good enough but it’s much better than worsening the quality of everyone’s education. Especially when they don’t even want to be there. We should have never put so much emphasis on getting everyone a college degree.
Let me tell you a tale from when I was going to college.
The school I was attending decided in my last year that it was no longer doing "need-blind" admissions. There was a minor uproar, but of course it went through.
So... you're saying the school will preferentially let in richer students to the organization if they can? You know, two applications being allegedly equal?
I leave it as an exercise to the reader how much objectivity on "equal applications" when one of the students basically is 10x richer (and parents that might donate), when you have to see how well affirmative action with "equal applications" has worked to get minorities into white collar jobs.
Of course what the college was doing was probably formalizing what it was doing anyway. Why would it do that?
Ohhhh,,, right, lets do way more egregious pay-for-admission that "pick the richer between equals". Right.
Then a decade later, I noticed all these chinese nationals on universitites, and the students said they were a bit of a headache because they were so obnoxiously rich.
Oh! The colleges figured out how to kill two birds with one stone: a rich foreigner is a minority AND rich! So they would coddle these scions as much as possible.
> If equity is so important, why not grant preferential treatment to all children coming from families that aren't upper-middle-class?
College education has always been sold as a way to keep your children elite, and to the less well-to-do, as a golden ticket to being elite. The issue with education is that it has been marketed as the ultimate wealth signal: "My daughter is attending ______." (too bad for your daughter who is at ______ State)
> Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack.
While this is true, standardized tests tend to favor children from more stable family situations and higher levels of wealth. The attack on the SAT is usually from the side favoring evening the odds for less financially advantaged groups.
Then what do you do for children coming from wealthy families who don't support them? Just because the parents have money doesn't mean they spend any of it or time on their kid, and with your system, those kids get screwed.
"To find out why elite colleges love legacies, two business school professors were granted access to 16 years of admissions data at one elite Northeastern college. The upshot: it’s in this school’s clear self-interest to take them. Alumni children who received offers matriculated at much higher rates, giving the school more certainty in their future enrollment numbers. And these loyal families with multi-generational ties to the college were far more likely to donate funds, money that the school needs, in part, to offer scholarships to others."
Colleges want to look good... but no chance in hell they'll give up consistent students of families who donate.
Cost effective? not when it'll cost them millions or billions in kick backs.
Yeah it's like they've never walked around a college campus and noticed that every other building is named after some alumni that has made large donations.
Banning legacy admissions is a coordination problem. Try to eliminate it at one school and parents (re: donors) will raise an uproar. It would need to be eliminated at the whole cohort of peer schools to eliminate parents’ exit option.
Semi-related anecdote: my alma mater got huge pushback from donors when it tried to eliminate its football team [0], which was legendarily bad and a recruiting nightmare to boot (apparently football rosters can be 100+, though Swarthmore’s was ~53). So there was about as clear a case for elimination as you could hope for, and still it was a big controversy that impacted the school where administrators tend to notice — its endowment.
So when we talk about eliminating legacy admissions, I picture that, but just a thousand times worse.
I have a really hard time believing this is being actively driven by collusion among rich families who know they could game non-SAT metrics. It would require a huge organizational effort, and for what? It's still not going to be a sure thing to get their kids in, there's gonna be even more randomness in the process after this change than there is now. And sending your kids to elite an school doesn't even buy them that much anyway if you're already rich & influential, you can pull strings to get them a job after they graduate from a mediocre school.
It's much easier to believe that this is being driven by college administrators who know that the way to advance their careers in the current climate is by passing radical social justice changes, and this particular idea is simply an organically popular fad among social justice influencers so it's the one they've latched onto.
Wouldn’t rank within their school be the hardest metric to game, since schools tend to be fairly segregated with respect to income levels?
The only way to game that metric would be for the wealthy to send their kids to schools that perform worse, which would wind up driving more resources to those schools.
The core problem is that merit-based entrance is inherently at odds with equality of outcome. Families that are better off rais more capable children on average
I think they raise children who are more effectively socialized and protected more so than more capable. I've known very capable people who don't have the status to refuse to kiss rings and they always get screwed in public schools.
The kids with sufficiently "decent" parents get handled with kid gloves and rule adherence, everyone else gets punched down with half-assery even when if they're experiencing injustice and unfairness.
Have known so many bright kids who get nowhere because of schools.
I'm not sure I follow everything you wrote. Are you saying that poverty produces children and individuals more capable of driving and succeeding in society?
That if one kid is poor or minority or unstable background, etc., and a bit of a loose cannon, they'll get graded lower for the same answers, punished or dismissed if they question anything, not going to be able or willing to check in before school or after class for more help, etc., meanwhile goody two shoes daughter of the town dentists will give the same answers, socialize better with the teacher, who knows the parent's status, and likes the kid, give her points back, and by the end of the semester they'll both be just as smart, but one will have an A- and the other a C+.
Basically kids having the "right" kind of parents and community connections and behavioral signifiers is at least ~1 letter grade overall regardless of students and ability.
Legacy admission should have been abolished long time ago. It’s systematic racism. Legacy admission has been part of the official admission system for the longest time. It's a system to favor the incumbents, the riches, the powerful, and the non-minority. It's used to ensure to give the elites are systematic unfair advantage.
Once a school is all lower class people it will stop being a high class product. Part of the value of these institutions is in reinforcing and renewing class solidarity.
I've made this proposal several times: judge an applicant by his/her delta relative to their cohort. For example (highly simplified) a kid from a wealthy family in a nice neighbourhood statistically scores 70% on average, if he scores 80 that's a +10. A kid from a poor single-parent household going to a dilapidated school where scores are 40% on average, if he scores 70 that's a +30.
Very rough example but the idea is this. Philosophically/ethically, it seems better. But practically as well: you want to admit the students most likely to excel if given the high quality resources at your university. Among a kid with all the comforts and private tutoring and all that, and a kid who rose way above his shitty lot in life, wouldn't the latter fit that description better?
I wonder if it would be better to just have a system where there are some number of elite university places set aside at some very high price for the rich. Perhaps the problem is the price would be too high / number of places too small that there would still be an incentive to try to get in through the ‘normal’ route. Plenty of top schools already set tuition prices based on family income.
It should satisfy people who want elite universities to be places to rub shoulders with other elites. My hope is that such a policy would reduce the incentive to game the ordinary system by throwing money at it.
But I guess the whole thing feels terribly unegalitarian and so couldn’t happen.
Perhaps an easier improvement would be if enrolment could be massively (say >2x) increased at elite schools.
I've seen this play out in a non-US country. My friend with wealthier parents got his loans paid because his parents didn't earn an 'income' and thus the state interpreted them as being poor. In reality they were fairly well off business owners who had a good accountant who channeled the cash flows through the lowest taxed entities.
> get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.”
Or they just completely fake it, like a few cases that were discovered a few years ago. [1]
Let's be honest though. Those with less "polish" that would be admitted on purely objective/anonymous merit might even excel academically at the university, but they would be excluded by the very same social games being played here.
Sometimes they might even be told that explicitly but usually an excuse will be concocted.
The real question should be:
> What is more cruel, excluding them early on or allowing them to "win" but then ignore them completely when the benefits of that are to be distributed?
All of these takes ignore the fact that college shouldn't be a privilege. As long as we keep to the point that only a select few can go to college then we'll keep fighting over scraps. Nobody in this debate wants a meritocracy because implementing one would harm their interests.
Interestingly I feel the same way about coding interviews, which HN seems to hate. I feel like studying and doing well on my coding interviews helped me get into top companies that otherwise would probably pass over my decidedly non-elite resume.
> If equity is so important, why not grant preferential treatment to all children coming from families that aren't upper-middle-class? Or ban legacy preferences at the very least?
Because the equity that the school cares about above all else is its endowment, and rich family legacies give more than anyone else by far.
This is an interesting idea. You could stratify the admissions process by family income level, and set bars for admission at each level that ensure an equal distribution of admissions relative to the population distribution of income.
The USSR under Khruschev tried something similar: they were worried that people were becoming stratified: university-educated people would send their children into universities, factory workers would send their children into technical schools. Surely in a perfect world the demographics of university students should reflect the demographics of their parents' generation?
So, a lot of restrictions and quotas were added to get these working-class children into universities. A couple of years after the first batch graduated the program was rolled back. Soviet scientists started to complain, because diversity and equity be damned, the quality of the graduates cratered. If you want to be able to rain nuclear fire on the USA, you need the best and the brightest working in your research institutes.
They were not just researching "how to rain nuclear fire on the US" but also how to send the first satellite into space, send a probe on Venus, put the first man in orbit, etc.
A big part of the problem is that means testing is largely a waste of time. If you boost people based on income you end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to figure out where the income line should be. Even if you can find a good point to put that line, the "rich kids who just didn't test well enough" will sue because they think college admissions should be a meritocracy, and bossing anyone for any reasons is somehow descrimination. They recently won a significant court case with that exact logic.
My next statement will be controversial, and is largely anecdotal, but there is very little to no research that contradicts my opinion, so I'm going to say it anyway. Smart, capable people who simply "don't test well" are almost non-existent. Even if they did, you can't accurately identify who doesn't test well except by giving them a job and letting them prove they were capable when they aren't under testing pressure. I have met hundreds of people who claimed they simply didn't test well, and only one of them later proved it by being genuinely capable and competent.
The thing that pisses me off the most about this whole debate, is that it only really matters if you think it matters whether you went to one of the top 10 universities available to you. Frankly, most employers will throw out your application if it says Harvard School of Business. The number of management jobs that want Harvard graduates is less than half the graduating class, and Business majors have it easier than most of the engineering degrees in that respect. If you're an electrical engineer, there are fewer than 100 jobs Nation wide, and they are already occupied. If you want to be a civil engineer, straight up forget about it. The medical and legal schools are the only exception, and those are graduate schools only.
There is far too much focus on whether the top 10 university admissions are fair and equitable, and far too little focus on whether we have affordable universities that meet decent educational standards for everyone who could reasonably earn a useful degree.
We definitely shouldn't be trying to get rid of standardized tests. There are arguments that can be made about their content, especially historically, but they have merit in showing whether a student is ready for certain classes. At a normal university, they use SAT and ACT scores to decide if you can skip algebra and go straight to calculus, or if you need to take even more basic classes before algebra, and they do this for science and English courses as well. Having such a laser focus on how the top 10 or top 50 schools that actually turn away applicants because they're at capacity is a massive failure to see the actual big picture when it comes to education.
If legacy wealthy kids can’t go to elite schools then the schools will not be elite. The schools the elite’s children go to are, by definition, the elite schools.
There's a market for getting underqualified students into fancy universities via legalized semi-bribery, but it would be bad for their image if they openly admitted to it. Hence the obfuscation.
"In the United States, legacy admissions in universities date back to the 1920s. Elite schools used legacy admissions to maintain spots for Anglo-Protestants amid fears that Jews, Catholics, and Asians were increasingly taking spots at the schools.[7][8]"
Where I come from some are named for illustrious alumni, some of whom financed the building. But as far as I know it didn't give their offspring an easier way to get accepted as students.
That sounds like conspiracy theory. I think it is more likely the combination of ordinary racism with woke militantism. They think certain minorities aren't smart enough to pass SAT standards so the solution to get more of them in, is to not test for SAT.
It's the same stupidity that leads well-thinking liberals to bring their kids to drag strip shows because in their little mind "trans = gogo dancers in gay clubs".
Standardized tests are much easier to prep for than GPA and extracurriculars. I don’t get where the statement “rich kids don’t test well” actually comes from, and it wasn’t just made up to argue a point. Perhaps if you had state sponsored test prep like in China (you spend the last two years of high school just prepping for the test), but high school isn’t compulsory and many poor kids don’t even attend.
> Standardized tests are much easier to prep for than GPA and extracurriculars
And that makes them perfect for poor kids who don't have much time or money, they can easily get similar levels of test prep as rich kid with little effort. GPA or extracurriculars however, no chance, those are much more dependent on home environment and wealth.
Yeah exactly. Being able to score well on some standardized test is way easier than being able to keep up performance year round when you have problems at home if you have the aptitude to succeed at either.
GPA is also much more subject to getting penalized because a teacher straight up hates you for being poor, disabled, male (this one is measurable by having teachers grade tests with different names), ugly, smelly, other thing K-12 teachers tend to dock you for even though on paper they shouldn’t.
Many extracurriculars are also expensive and poor kids don’t get to do a lot of them or excel at them to the same degree.
People are so oblivious to how judgy and twisted a solid chunk of teachers are. Obviously not the majority, but it only takes a few to really screw things up for people without enough of a support system.
Agreed except the easily part. You need to even know that you can prep, and have some clue about prepping, along with quiet places at home or a library you can get to to do the work. Let's not make a lot of assumptions here.
The only exception I can think of are the temporarily poor; e.g. refugees from Southeast Asia or Africa whose families were well to do back home and still have that familial knowledge even if they are currently lacking in money.
You don't see why studying 20 hours for 1 test that you can easily repeat is easier to scrape together than 2000 hours to score well on all tests throughout high school?
The SAT and ACT are pretty easy in this regard. You can do really good at it just by practicing for a few months. Nothing like the Chinese Gaokao, which you need to study for a couple of years at least.
SAT stands for aptitude test, why would an aptitude test require multi-hundred hours of studying? All you need is to know a bit of math and how to read and you can score really well, you'd think that would be a shit test but apparently 90% of people can neither read well nor do a bit of math, so it is actually a good test.
The SAT stopped being called an Aptitude test in 1994, when they decided it didn't mean anything except "correlated to score on other SAT sessions, and to college GPA"
If you can't find the time to do your normal tests for GPA, you won't find time to study for the SAT either. Whether that's because you live in an unsupportive home or you just can't find the discipline, it's only theoretical that someone who isn't used to a studying environment can somehow have the foresight to invest their few hours on this particular exam.
> If you can't find the time to do your normal tests for GPA, you won't find time to study for the SAT either.
That is just nonsense. Lets say that you have 20 hours to study per year, like a couple of weekends that are calmer etc, you can spend those on SAT and you got basically the full benefits of studying for that test since studying more isn't very beneficial. But 20 hours to study per year wont budge your GPA much at all. Close to every kid can find 20 hours to study per year, I'm pretty sure.
Or do you think that people can either study all the time, or study none of the time, no in-between at all?
Edit:
> it's only theoretical that someone who isn't used to a studying environment can somehow have the foresight to invest their few hours on this particular exam.
Not at all, I never studied for anything in high school and got shit grades. But I spent a weekend to study for a SAT once, got good on that, and got into college that way. This isn't theoretical at all, it happens all the time. It is very different to do something for a very short time, or keeping that up for 4 years straight.
Have you ever met kids who aren't good at studying? Do you think they somehow get their shit together just for this one test, because they read somewhere that it's judged fairly and a great investment of time? Teenagers will somehow know that 20 hours, that's where Jensson's return curve breaks?
People who study a lot study a lot for the SAT, people who study little study little for the SAT, and in between people do an in between amount of SAT. That somehow seems like a good starting point, which we'll probably be stuck on given evidence will be hard to come by.
FWIW there were kids in my kid's class who had three tutors and studied every day over the summer holiday (the test is right after). They would have stopped if it was so obvious the benefits stop past some level. Just as there will be people who think it's a great idea to put 1000 hours into it, there's going to be people who think they'll just show up on the day and see how it goes.
Edit: seems this wasn't a direct descendent of the the thread I thought it was, about the UK 11+, but the point is the same.
> Have you ever met kids who aren't good at studying? Do you think they somehow get their shit together just for this one test, because they read somewhere that it's judged fairly and a great investment of time? Teenagers will somehow know that 20 hours, that's where Jensson's return curve breaks?
I was one of those kids. I never had a stable home, I have 5 siblings with many parents, I moved between different parents, lived on the floor with mom and siblings at one of her friends homes for a few months etc. But mustering up the energy to put in effort for one test is still possible, doing that for everything, no way.
Kids aren't stupid, they have spent years doing things, reading things, it isn't hard to find out information about college, SAT etc. A bad home doesn't mean you are stupid even though you make it sound like it does.
Yes, but do you think that's what normally happens? I would suggest that what normally happens in your situation is that no studying gets done and you bomb the test.
I also know people who've been in your situation, and that's what I see more often than not.
I can understand if you think that's what the SATs are for though, a kind of lifeline for kids in bad situations. I just have reservations about it actually working enough of the time to not simply be another opportunity hoarding play by wealthier people.
I don't get you here, poor people are in much greater need of lifelines than rich people, removing the lifeline from poor people just because rich people also use it is just horrible.
The main effect of removing it is that disenfranchised smart kids don't get into college, replaced by dumb kids with stable homes who spent a ton of time studying yet were too dumb to score well on SAT. Colleges are already full of such kids, and so is the job market, we don't need more of them.
GPA is not a bunch of tests. Schools make it so box checkers who squeak get every opportunity to make up for their ability with cooperative socialization. While other students who don't do the right stuff and aren't involved in the right extracurriculars get everything rounded down, and rounded down harder if they speak up.
GPA and extracurriculars are so much easier to game than standardized tests, it's not even close. Moreover, this is what all the research on the topic suggests.
Cram schools exist for a reason. You can get lots of help on the ACT/SATs, heck, they even offer it in China.
Grades and extra circular can be gamed as well, but you have to do a lot more planning ahead of time...like you can't just start 6 months before a test date and maybe try again 6 months after that. You have to start form late elementary school and be consistent up until 12th grade.
>I don’t get where the statement “rich kids don’t test well” actually comes from, and it wasn’t just made up to argue a point.
When I read what you said and thought the same thing. I then looked up what the author wrote:
Rich kids who “don’t test well.”
He's just saying if you have a kid that doesn't test well (I am one of those) and happen to be wealthy, the rich have options that poor kids don't. He isn't saying rich kids don't tend to test well.
I'm not sure that premise is 100% accurate either. My parents were teachers and we didn't have extravagant lives, but my parents knew the value of an education and forced me to do test prep 6 days a week the summer after my Junior year. I ended up improving my scores and getting into a good state university and subsequently have a good career 25+ years and still going strong.
I think edge case success (students that don't test well) boils down more to parents giving a shit than anything else. It's not easy, that's for sure, even if you are moderately wealthy.
Usually things are designed so that these kids can still get A's if their tests are all B's, B's if tests are all C's, and so forth. Often with some special extra credit offered just to makes sure they can always get at least a B.
What? I think you have the wrong kind of standardized test in mind. Bad standardized tests written by politicians are easy to prepare for. Often by design, since they are supposed to measure "what you have learned", rather than how smart you are.
> Standardized tests are much easier to prep for than GPA and extracurriculars.
Based on comments so far, I'm curious what you mean by this. My own take is that you are correct because standardized tests are 'easier to prep for' because, in many ways, they are IQ tests that you can't prep for, or rather that Bang for the Buck of prepping is low. So, poor, smart kids with no prep can take the test hung over and do well, as the author says. Rich folks can get tutors to spend tens or hundreds of hours prepping, and have only a modest impact on their score.
SAT prep tests do have some impact, but much more significantly, re-takes and disability accommodations are highly impactful and heavily SES-correlated.
There's a lot of evidence that it's difficult to drastically change someone's test scores in a year or two, and it's compounded by the degree of internal motivation of the test taker. And there's an element of reversion to the mean with children of some high achievers.
Meanwhile, GPA and extracurriculars are significantly reflections of socialization and parents rather than anyone's inherent or learned abilities.
Standardized tests remain the only criteria totally in the control of the student. You can study for them and objectively do better, become a better applicant. Everthing else is either circumstantial or based in the opinion of others, mostly highschool teachers. If i had to rely on my highschool teachers' opinion of me i would not have ever gone to university let alone have won scholarships. Standardized testing allowed me to overcome thier base opinions.
Want to be a lawyer but are not sure about law school and do
ot know any lawyers? Look to the LSAT. Do well and where you went to university/highschool doesnt matter. Do really well and scholarships will appear. That is the freedom of good standardized testing.
It helps to have some familiarity with the test, so test prep has some value, but some rich kids can’t test their way out of a paper bag. The one thing they could do is hire a ringer to take the test for them, otherwise it is a valuable form of downward mobility which presents a “barrier” to them hoarding opportunity from someone more able.
Yes, exactly. “Holistic” evaluation is entirely game-able.
The claim is that they are trying to give the kid from East New York a shot but the reality is that this is all about the Dalton parents not wanting their little precious to have to go head to head on a fair playing field against a Stuyvesant kid.
Their goal is to make all desirable institutions look like Dalton—-very wealthy students with an appropriate sprinkling of diversity make everyone feel great about how open minded and progressive they are.
Not just gameable, but provably biased to start with against applicants from a lower-class background. And with K-12 public education declining even further in quality, the bias against students from less privileged backgrounds and having less outside support will only increase.
What I’m saying is that isn’t “the issue,” it’s just pretext.
Schools can do affirmative action for African Americans without making standardized testing optional, they have been for decades. What’s harder for them to do without getting rid of such tests is discriminating against Asians (and middle class whites) in favor of rich whites.
It’s no coincidence that this is happening in the wake of the Harvard lawsuit. What these schools want is a class made up entirely of diversity, athlete, and development admits. The first generation Asian-American kid isn’t taking a seat away from a black kid, he’s taking it from the son of the CFO of a Fortune 500 company.
Affirmative action is a big bugaboo that will probably be subject of a Supreme Court action.
I think these are complex issues and there’s no scenario where everyone is happy. As a society we’d be better off to tone down the fawning over Ivy League schools.
One thing that amuses me is that I occasionally see press releases about some Hollywood star (say Alyssa Milano) who took an IQ test and got a 145 score which is suspiciously the top score for
and given that standard variants of the test have 60 items anybody who is capable of learning a script could memorize them and get a perfect score. I imagine there is one psychologist who coaches you then you go see another psychologist across the street who administers the test.
Why would that be surprising? Gifted people tend to be that way in multiple areas. I wouldn't be surprised if the average IQ in Hollywood is quite above the overall average.
Yes, structurally if not deliberately (it is unlikely that mainstream IQ tests are anything but diligently designed to avoid overt bias, unlike those of the middle 20th century). If you measure something that has a large SES causative component, and SES is for whatever reason itself highly correlated with race, then your measurements will encode a racial bias.
The big debate in academic psychology is the extent to which factors like SES (and factors downstream of SES, like general health) confound the measurement of some kind of general intelligence. The evidence we have right now pretty clearly points to an effect, so it's down to what the size of that effect is.
Your second statement is incorrect.
Having a racial bias would mean that IQ tests are incorrect (having significantly different errors) for certain samples/groups. But no one is saying that.
Imagine a test to measure the resistance of various materials. Is the test biased because it shows that concrete is stronger than rotten wood? No, it just measures the resistance of different materials. If the measurement error (not the measurement itself) was significantly different for different materials then yes you could say the test is biased.
You are just saying that SES affects intelligence, which is most likely true and immediately prompts the question of what affects SES.
A large percentage of the population seems to believe that IQ and similar cognitive ability tests are something like a credit score, having no purpose but to direct society to the high scorers so that they can be showered with opportunity, while denying the same to low scorers. And it's true that tests like the SAT can have a big impact on the opportunities we get in life. But they can also be used in a more win-win way, to match people to opportunities they're ready for. And for that, you need an honest assessment of where the person is actually at, separate from how they got there.
A poor kid may score worse than they would have scored if they weren't poor, but if we want to know whether they're ready for MIT or a course above their grade level, it might do them a disservice to confound our perceptions of their actual current level with our personal indignation over socioeconomic inequalities and our hopes in the potential they'd realize if those inequalities were eliminated.
Bias has many different meanings. Now, correct me if I'm mistaken, but in this context, I believe we are talking about bias as a difference between a measured value and a true value.
What is the true value in this case? Is it the counterfactual performance a person would have if their SES were not low? Would that be the "right" true value in all applications? Might it not be the case that, in some contexts, the "right" true value is the person's actual current ability level and not some counterfactual of how they would do in other circumstances that were perhaps more just and fair? For example, what if you are trying to give them the learning opportunity best suited to their actual current ability level, not trying to rank people and only give the top-ranked some special status or credential?
There's virtually no such thing as ringers taking tests.
The majority of rich kids, whose parents are serious about college, are tracked through prep schools beginning with kindergarten.
Its more rare than not that such a kid underperforms enough to be excluded from elite University admission. Especially once one includes the many elite liberal arts colleges that are generally off of the radar of poors.
I do agree about the value of standardized testing, but for the reason that it enables positive filtering of underprivileged kids who otherwise wouldn't be looked at. I don't believe that a downward pull on rich kids is all that significant. To politely disagree with the reasoning of an otherwise well intentioned post.
I attended prep school as a poor. One of the most egregious things that I've ever witnessed, in terms of admissions, is a truly stupid poor being admitted to an Ivy because his Father networked enough as the a prep school's soccer coach (soccer being why his son was at the prep school, but not why he was admitted to the Ivy). I knew this kid from when we attended Catholic school together before the prep school.
Respectfully, the issue of unprovided testing accommodations is only relevant for kids with a disability.
This would not apply to everyone else. Only to kids with an unidentified disability. Which will be more in the underprivileged group, but it is still a minuscule group.
Especially taken in the context of elite University admissions, for which we are actually speaking of the even rarer child that is "twice exceptional'. That is, gifted with a disability.
This assumes that the rich kid rate is accurate and what’s missing is parallel accommodations for poorer kids.
But what about if instead the elevated rate is a result of fraud? In other areas of life (e.g. service animals and medical pot) it’s pretty clear that there are medical professionals out there are selling their letterhead to the highest bidder.
All the people I know who have been able to claim disability for psychiatric reasons as adults have come from upper middle class families (e.g. my bipolar aunt whose brother was the superintendent of buildings for a small cities, a friend who dropped out of grad school after not seeing his advisor for nine months whose father was a specialist manager for failing Montgomery wards stores, an ex-friend who suffered from panic disorder and agoraphobia whose father was an doctor in the army who later rose high in the ranks of the medical establishment.)
Conversely I've seen people from hardscrabble backgrounds who are obviously disabled (a friend with no diagnosis but who so thought disordered that even though she are addicted to cigarettes it would take hours for her to get it together enough to smoke her first cigarette even with help) who would struggle to deal with the paperwork to get food stamps and TAANF, never mind the much more difficult and adversarial process to get SSI or SSDI.
Why should you believe that it is "happening here"?
Let alone at a significant rate.
Why is this wild conjecture worth a discussion?
Give me a break.
As a clinician that evaluates disabilities, it is very difficult to fake one. They tend to be diagnosed at an early age, and not at "test time" in high school. In fact, as a person ages they are much less likely to receive a diagnosis. There has to be early-age evidence even if the diagnoses is later in life.
The disability rate in elite / prep schools exists but is low. These kids tend to be more on the spectrum than anything else.
Underperforming kids who don't have a disability, and might be prone to cheat by one means or another, and who aren't sports recruits tend to transfer to easier schools.
If a kid wants to go through the process of being fraudulently diagnosed by an independent psychologist with ADHD, for the purpose of accommodations, then the same process is discoverable by literally anyone with an internet connection. That is, by everyone.
And from what I know, this has much less to do with clinician corruption than it does with the individual faking symptoms. There's few to zero people risking their licenses to hand out fake diagnoses for scheduled medications that are under heavy scrutiny at all times by the States and the Feds. The liability alone is off of the charts.
Schools are only likely to accept the diagnoses if a thorough clinical evaluation is undertaken. The result of which is not able to be faked.
Why should we believe that affluent parents clinician-shop and get a diagnosis from a friendly clinician? Because of the reporting that says so, linked upthread:
What makes a psychologist an “independent psychologist“? Are they selected and paid for by someone other than the parents?
We see in medical malpractice cases that there’s always two expert witnesses and their respective testimonies always line up with the interests of the side that’s paying them. Why aren’t those clinicians worried about losing their licenses?
Edit: I upvoted your post, it was gray, I appreciate engagement especially from those that disagree with me.
There was a psychiatrist in my town who specialized in prescribing stimulants and benzodiazepines to hippies. One of his patients would get a scaled-up pill bottle the size of a small trash can full of Dexedrine every month, another got 3x a dose of Klonopin that would turn me into zombie. Frequently his "patients" would use only a portion of their medication and sell the rest for (often badly needed) income.
I almost dropped the dime on him because one of his patients was a severely disturbed friend of mine who did not have a proper diagnosis (I'd conjecture today she had schizoaffective disorder) and I think would have benefited from a change in medication -- but we never found out because she took her own life. I'm pretty sure somebody else dropped the dime on him.
There are more ringers taking tests than we probably know. I used to teach SAT prep and I was propositioned multiple times about this (usual subtle). Of course I never did it, but I’m sure they could find someone.
Correct. It’s a way to “cycle the elites”. A healthy society will always include an elite minority. But to remain healthy there needs to be a way to circulate the elites so that those that should rise have methods to and those that should fall get their spot taken. Trying to engineer this around arbitrary things like sex or race can’t work because those people don’t have what it takes in the end.
Sure, I’m just using terms that Gaetano Mosca uses when describing elite theory.
As for litmus test, again sure. But accounting for cultural and biological differences matters. There’s a reason Asians are over represented in certain things due to a culture that values education. Or men tending to distribute differently than women. And many other things. It would be naive to believe any difference in outcomes is purely discriminatory. Although of course that can be a factor.
> But accounting for cultural and biological differences matters
This could mean different things to different people
Lets imagine we have a perfectly objective, merit based hiring/admissions process. We could still have proffeshions with 1% women, or 1% blacks, etc.
This could be caused by culture, say no women want to be bricklayers or software developers. Or men spent insane amount of effort, like more than is logical.
There is still a valid debate, what do we do about this. Maybe you should not just 'let it play out'.
Like we should hypothetically reward people that work hard.
But recently we had some poor intern at Goldman literally die from overwork. He worked himself to death, died for like £30K salary, what a waste.
Should we really reward that? Should the company face some consequences if this keeps happening?
Obviouslt we kniw 'Back in the day' culture for women was such, that they would not be prepared, in skills and in attitude, to compete with men in education or employment.
If we never went for cultural change, it would still be that way.
It think it's really important that at early stages in life more people are given a chance to change course. That's what educational institutions are for.
I had a law prof once correct a student: "If we all just tell lies then this entire system breaks down." People hiring ringers, telling lies during the examination process, is a problem. It it isn't a statement against the concept of examinations. The answer is to make it difficult to cheat (ID etc) and establish appropriate punishments to dissuade. The ability to cheat illustrates a flaw in the testing procedure, not any flaw in the actual test.
I've seen this recently with the elementary school near me. Grading is extremely opaque, and seems to be largely based on teacher intuition. Some very advanced students have gotten grades below where they are (I've heard many teachers just won't give the highest grade until the end of the year because of the weird system).
Thankfully they also have standardized test scores, which both have a much more transparent scoring method and seem a much better match for the children's competency. It's not that standardized tests are perfect, but removing them makes things extremely capricious, and often very unfair.
It is true that many teachers react very badly to the best students, particularly where the students are very evidently smarter than the teachers. In this age of ready access to information, any student with a drive to learn can quickly be head-and-shoulders above the average highschool teacher in a given subject. Good teachers help such students. Bad ones get jealous and seek to harm them.
What you say is true, but I've seen this happening even with good teachers. I think there's a few reasons for this - first, if you have a large class and a student is already meeting all the standards, you're going to spend the time you have on the students falling behind. Teachers are going to want all the students to know what they're supposed to for that grade, rather than to have some advanced far off the grade while others fail.
Even if they had the time, there seems to be very little interest in advanced students across the board, and few if any programs put in place to meet their needs.
Secondly, there aren't many opportunities for students to demonstrate that they exceed the standards. Getting a class test entirely correct demonstrates that they know what is being taught, but nothing more. One thing I like about the standardized tests they're given now is that the computer will adjust and ask more advanced problems if the students get answers correct.
When I applied to secondary school, I barely made the cut and was one of the lowest-scoring students to be accepted that year, only ranking around the 4th percentile of those accepted. Once I started attending, I performed exceptionally well, ranking around the 95th percentile, give or take 5. It was mainly due to the fact that a large minority of my primary school teachers had biased opinions about me and our personal differences affected my grades.
I’ve noticed this too. I assume it is because the teachers don’t want parents to realize the school is failing their child until it is too late to have the teacher (or school) address the situation.
>Grading is extremely opaque, and seems to be largely based on teacher intuition.
Grading in certain subjects is just laughable. Can you objectively evaluate English essays so that 97/100 is "better" than 96/100? Why not add more significant digits: 96983/100000!
That's right. Now add the fact that people can have a thirty point swing in score between attempts and without a difference in studying.
Total education and intelligence are largely what determines one's score. Beyond basic studying that literally everyone can and should do, no one is going to cram-course their way to a 250 point difference. Which when I took the test, was often the difference between say a successful Ivy applicant and a successful Duke applicant. Lesser private and public school applicants dropping from there.
That is SAT test prep courses specifically though. Not going in completely cold versus having prepped for the test. I mean, if I took the SAT today many years on, I'm sure I wouldn't do very well--at least on the math section. There's too much that isn't muscle memory any longer because I haven't done a lot of the high school math stuff in years.
Certainly. My point was more though that, while I could hopefully reasonably puzzle my way through a SAT test without doing any prep, I doubt I'd do a very good job within a time limit because I'd be puzzling a lot of things out that I learned decades ago and haven't really used since without checking a book out of the library and spending at least a few days with it..
quoting the penultimate paragraph (why are the relevant bits always buried?)
> Analyzing a 2008 survey conducted by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, he noted that one-third of respondents described a jump from 750 to 770 on the math portion of the SAT as having a significant effect on a student’s chances of admissions, and this was true among counselors at more and less selective schools alike. Even a minor score improvement for a high-achieving student, then—and one that falls within the standard measurement error for the test—can make a real difference.
Your link literally says:
- test prep improves scores
- most conservative possible study suggests ~25 point bump in score
- college admission stats show this matters for many applicants
???
the fact that the piece ALSO says, later on:
> students who have a mean score on the math portion of the SAT around 450. According to the same admissions counselor survey, a 20-point improvement to a score in this range would have no practical meaning for students who are trying to get into more selective schools
and no kidding. 450 on either section is clearly not suitable for a college experience at a "selective school." You're expected to do multivariable calc during MIT's freshman year, regardless of major. 450 on math SAT means you can't do algebra.
I guess 25 points does make a difference but I do think it’s a pretty small difference, especially at the top of the range. I remember the MIT admissions blogs years ago claimed that they do not distinguish at all between a 750 and an 800.
>> Standardized testing allowed me to overcome their base opinions.
The only K-12 school in which my children have been enrolled that has never reported standardized test scores to student's parents also happened to be a private school. I suspect the school's motive is a combination of not wanting to give leverage to parents whose children do well, and not wanting to piss off the wealthy parents. We are in the first group and thankfully my children weren't at that school for very long due to COVID lockdowns.
Make it 100% achievement. Any differences in background must be supplemented with aggressive college prep programs so the bar isn't weakened for some. It's the only way to remain globally competitive. And abolish legacy.
(Don't get a JD unless set on a particular practice because the field is overflowing. Consider MD or DDS first.)
Magnet programs operating from kindergarten on are one possible solution. The problem is that these programs are being effectively phased out because less-astute normals are insulted that everyone doesn't qualify. Which is the inverse precise equivalent of eliminating special ed programs.
Yup. My HS grades nearly completely depended on whether the teacher was assessing my knowledge or my effort. While most everyone complained about tests and especially the final being equal weight to each quarter year's grade, I thought it was great to effectively get 10 week credit for focusing on a 2-hour exam... So, yes, it is one thing that is far more in the student's control, and my SAT scores definitely helped me get into top colleges (although I did have to also take some extra classes to demonstrate that I could get good grades from doing work).
In re to LSAT at least a decade ago your LSAT score meant shit.
I’m S Asian, scored 99th percentile 17x, but my GPA was around 3.3 because I think college is a joke when it involves homework. I had never gotten less than a A on midterms and finals, but what I’m trying to say is that GPA and race matters much more.
There was a law school acceptance calculator. With my scores and my Asian background, the T14 were either out of reach or I had somewhat of a chance at a lower rank of those schools.
Law school is probably the most atrocious when it comes to race based acceptance. Changed my race on the calculator and my chances became green across the board basically.
Being Asian is hard enough. We have to succeed because our parents and in some cases like me know what life is like without running water or electricity, genocide every few years, etc.
It sucks that no school ever looks at that. I grew up without running water nor a toilet, and multiple people living in a home that was barely 400sq ft. Yet nobody cares about that because I’m Asian, the wrong minority.
Yes I don’t give a shit about homework, I understand the material which is why I’m slaying each test. I hated that about college. We are adults. I’m paying to get an education, why the fuck is homework 20% of the grade? It’s practice, for people who don’t get the material.
Education is a joke. when I see a fellow asian person from a top uni I know they had to be actually extraordinary to get in and come out.
> Yes I don’t give a shit about homework, I understand the material which is why I’m slaying each test. I hated that about college. We are adults. I’m paying to get an education, why the fuck is homework 20% of the grade? It’s practice, for people who don’t get the material.
So what you're admitting is that you are willing to not to do required parts of your job because you don't feel they're important. If you go out into the workforce and become a lawyer, what parts of your job are equally willing to blow off because you don't like them? Billing clients properly? Procedural stuff like filing answers properly?
You're basically arguing that your unwillingness to do the assigned tasks not be held against you.
Besides I worked the entire time in college to pay for college. Being penalized because I don’t have time to do homework without which I can’t pay for school helps nobody. I don’t think I ever got anything lower than a B on an exam, and nothing lower than A on a final/midterm/project.
And yeah, homework is for people who need it. Work and school are totally different one you’re learning the other you’re utilizing what you learned. Having homework be worth anything more than maybe 5% is stupid. I’m not getting paid to do homework, in fact I am paying to even learn.
People do homework and still fail. So what’s the point of homework?
Learning theory of repetition and stretch goals have been found to help many trying to learn. Some sort of neuron network establishment neuroscientifically.
The point of homework is to help you learn the material. Okay, you didn't happen to need it. The point of _requiring_ the homework is so that the students who do need it actually do it and get something from the class. It has to be worth enough for they typicals to not total shirk it.
LSAT can be taken at 18. Discounting 2-3 years for a course and we have 15 year olds. Are we holding 15 year olds as liable as adults? That they must grind 3 years of course with full intensity while already dealing with teenage problems? Sounds like hell.
> Yes I don’t give a shit about homework, I understand the material which is why I’m slaying each test. I hated that about college. We are adults. I’m paying to get an education, why the fuck is homework 20% of the grade? It’s practice, for people who don’t get the material.
What discipline did you study in undergrad?
In many majors - or even just in well-taught classes - work outside of lecture or recitation is designed to complement what you are learning. It _is_ the education you're paying for. It isn't high school where it's a bunch of repetition of the same concept (although I'd vigorously defend that, too) intended as practice. Problem sets ought to be the application of the material you're introduced to in lecture, done so in a way that forces you to grapple with and connect core concepts to other material in your major.
For example, in grad school I TA'ed an upper-level undergraduate course that would typically have 15-20 students. The problem sets I created with the professor I worked for had problems split across two themes. The first was discover; we'd take something that seemed ho-hum or rote from class, and apply it to an oddball setting which yielded surprising results. Sure, that straightforward equation works - but why does it go so weird in this curated example we're providing? There's extraordinary opportunity for learning there.
The second theme was connection across disciplines. Introduce a mathematics, computer science, or other concept and use it to extend something from lecture in an interesting way. These problems were intended t be challenging. We referred students to other textbooks and invited them to work together or come to office hours to fill in gaps in their background, because (a) this is a _vital_ skill to learn, and (b) it led to really cool and interesting problems and solutions.
There simply is not time in lecture or recitation to cover the stuff we introduced in these homework assignments. That's why the course credit hours tallied up to 3x the amount of time spent in lecture. I'll also note that while challenging, we did not allow poor marks on or incomplete problem sets derail a student's grade. If in lecture/recitation participation and on exams they clearly knew the core content, we'd work with the students to ensure they got a high grade. But if someone shirked off the homework entirely but aced the exams? Well, the exams aren't testing everything we're teaching you in this course, so you better believe they'd get poor grades at the end of the term.
So your perspective seems warped. If you weren't doing the homework, then you didn't get the education you paid for, and that's on you - not the university.
To me education is about what you learn. And I’m happy that I aced every single exam and project.
Like I mentioned to the other poster, there are people who do all the homework and still fail the class.
I aced every single project, midterm, and final. I can understand most topics the first or second time I learn them, and when I don’t I will do some homework. But for the most part I personally didn’t need it and I got penalized. I also worked during college so I could afford to not commute, so i was glad I didn’t need to do the homework to do well in everything else.
So explain that to me. I recall students who did homework would still fail and then the professor would do some last saving grace move where you do some BS work to get an extra five percent.
Someone who understands the material would ace the exams. In my experience most people did not ace the exams and in fact would hate on me and some others who would “kill the curve”.
Finally fwiw I went to a lower ranked state college not some MIT tier place. They were the only college who offered the most financial aid so I was able to graduate with under 7k owed while affording to live on campus.
Paid off my debt in the first months paycheck lol.
No doubt school is far more about social signaling than intelligence. For someone like you without the personality trait of conscientiousness (at the time of doing homework), you would have been better served by finding an employer who only cared about an iq test. Another factor is social conformity that employers are looking for.
You're special. Congratulations! You have a unique capability to absorb knowledge. In my experience, this means one of two things: either (1) you truly are brilliant and will exceed at anything you apply to, or (2) at some point you will run into something that you _don't_ understand after the first or second try, and you'll be entirely unequipped and unprepared to deal with that. Also in my experience, (2) is far more common than (1).
Bashing your head against difficult things in a low-stakes environment where folks are literally paid to help you navigate failure is a great way to extend the runway until (2) hits. Again - you're _paying_ for this opportunity in college.
> ... then the professor would do some last saving grace move where you do some BS work to get an extra five percent.
Maybe it's not BS work? Maybe there's something to creating relationships with the people you work with, and creating alternative avenues for them to help you, since it's literally their job?
I had an undergrad once who did reasonable on their homework problem sets, but just could not get it together in the written exams. Turns out their was an anxiety issue involved. But they came to my office hours for help, and put in the effort, so I was more than happy to see what I could do to ensure that not only would they learn the material to the best of their ability, but that we could soften the blow of a less-than-perfect final mark in the course. I wouldn't go to such lengths for a name on a paper who I saw in lecture but otherwise had no interaction with... how do I know they actually put in the effort and knew the material?
> Someone who understands the material would ace the exams. In my experience most people did not ace the exams and in fact would hate on me and some others who would “kill the curve”.
Depends entirely on the exam. I've taken exams for coursework that I truly thought I had mastery over and utterly bombed them. I've also taken exams for courses that I was convinced I was going to fail, and done well, too.
In my experience, it's actually very difficult to write an in-person exam that rewards mastery over course material. I've encountered very few such exams in my life that didn't resort to gimmicks or "gotchas" in the material. It's much easier in a timed, in-person setting to write busy work that has tricks built in so things simplify away and get rid of a lot of the manual work.
It’s just that I’m seeing all these so called solutions to problems in education like removing SAT while students who need to be well equipped to learn like a sponge and retain that knowledge are imo/ime just left to the side.
It’s cool that you seem really invested in helping people succeed. That wasn’t my experience, because I recall my professor calling me out all the time because I was late to his class. Like bro I’m sorry no disrespect meant but I’m doing my best and it’s not like I am failing your class. Unless you make it so I do because you grade stuff like showing up on time.
Again education is a paid for expense. It isn’t a charity, and I’m paying to learn. Not do charades.
And IRL you are either getting paid to do a job or busting to make a dollar. Totally different world imo.
If I could do it over again, I’d probably have taken that 200k risk and gone to the best school I got into but didn’t offer any fin aid. And I’d probably have studied CS and Math instead of business because I ended up teaching myself software engineering.. it just sucks that education isn’t tailored to the student, and people want to do all the things except grade people on what they can demonstrate (tests/material).
I firmly believe that the final exam is what shows whether a student understands the material. When graded on anything besides that, I personally don’t care anymore. That’s just my opinion. Otherwise just remove grading completely and do pass/fail. Or just pass everyone for giving them the check each semester.
Where you go to school still greatly affects how well you are likely to do on standardised tests. Better schools can easily bump students up 2 or 3 grades compared to poorer schools. To some extent this will also improve students’ ability to complete degree courses, but there’s also a great extent to which this is just teaching students how to pass standardised tests well. It’s true that truly excellent students will do well regardless of school, but you’ll end up with mostly average students from good schools.
Universities in the UK use A-level results (which are mostly based on standardised tests), but will sometimes compensate (lower) the required grade based on a students school and background. Which IMO works out fairer in practice.
You seem to be saying that "better schools" (mostly) don't actually select or train better students, but (mostly) merely train them to pass standardized tests better. Is there any evidence or reason to believe this?
With all due respect, that's not right. Any student attending a prep school from kindergarten, or otherwise very early, will have their development accelerated as compared to a child who attends an average school. The effect compounds with each year.
This doesn't somewhat improve college performance. It creates a markedly different brain and habits. An effect that declines as entrance into such a school system becomes later. Middle school being exceptionally late. High school being so late so as to have a marginal effect if any. Kindergarten being optimal.
Prep schools, generally speaking, only give basic test instruction for college entrance exams. Other standardized testing is the same or even less than normal schools. Cram-course style instruction is generally private and paid for privately by any given family. In my experience, the vast majority of prep school students don't seek it. This is in the United States.
>> truly excellent students will do well regardless of school
Not if they go to a school that doesn't have the prerequisites for college/university. Not if the school is so poorly-resourced that they don't have access to the study material, or even access to take the standardized tests they need. Not if the teachers are jerks. Go luck getting into a university science program if your highschool didn't teach science.
(Yes, that is a thing even in the US. Many religious schools do not teach what we who read HN would call "science", which makes university applications tricky.)
> Where you go to school still greatly affects how well you are likely to do on standardised tests. Better schools can easily bump students up 2 or 3 grades compared to poorer schools...
Neither SAT nor ACT are measured in "grades", so it's not clear what you mean to say here.
> Standardized tests remain the only criteria totally in the control of the student. You can study for them and objectively do better, become a better applicant.
This view ironically makes schools and education irrelevant. Why even send students to school, if test scores are "totally" in the control of the student?
Agree, when school is there just to mark elite status.
For those pursuing expertise though, schools can provide a lot of value through offering access to others with talent and to some degree infrastructure.
That these schools serve both sets of demand is a problem: Sure hand out the elite status tokens to favored groups, they dont matter much anyways. But if society actually believes that there are pressing problems that need to be solved (global warming perhaps etc) training resources should be aimed at those who can best go on to make use of them.
> For those pursuing expertise though, schools can provide a lot of value through offering access to others with talent and to some degree infrastructure.
I think you misunderstood what I meant. When I was referring to schools, I meant high school and earlier. In other words, the schools that should presumably give you an education relevant to the standardized tests.
OP is not saying Only standardized tests are relevant, what he is saying is after your education, SATs are the level playing field which you can prepare for, the preparation is within the student's control. Otherwise its all fuzzy and vague extra-curriculars etc which will decide who gets in.
The Elites will still get in and the people at the other extreme will also get in, but its the ones in the middle who will suffer.
I don't think one can just hand-wave away the primary school in this way and at the same time talk about a level playing field and dismiss extra-curriculars. They're all related.
Moreover, for better or worse, college is not a purely academic exercise. Colleges are looking for applicants who will participate in the social life of the campus, not just robotically go to class. They want students to participate in college extra-curriculars too.
People can participate in the social life of campus at any college. The problem with using this supposed socializing metric at the expense of more academically qualified kids is that it just shuffles the more academically talented kids to a lesser University. Where they what? Supposedly socialize less. Why should the social kids go to the academically rigorous college and the academic talents go to a lesser University? In the end, this socializing metric is bs cover in order to juke admissions for the purposes of legacy and diversity criteria.
The notion also relies on an inaccurate stereotype of what smart looks like. In practice, you are as or more likely to see an Ivy-level academic talent that looks like a leader than not.
Its rare to find lesser academic talents who will have better extra-curriculars than the best academically inclined candidates. The latter's prep schools will generally offer far more opportunity in that regard, and moreover any excellence in EC's is in a competitive environment that is often more intense.
> Why should the social kids go to the academically rigorous college and the academic talents go to a lesser University?
I was speaking from the perspective of college admissions, not from the perspective of applicants. Note also that I said "for better or worse". I wasn't making an overall judgment of the university system, merely noting that colleges themselves find extra-curricular activities important. I personally would abolish the invitation-only university system and provide continuing state-supported education to everyone. What is the purpose of the current university system, other than a largely non-educational social purpose? The selectivity of admissions inevitably results in further disparity among citizens, between the club members and non-members, the haves and have nots.
> The notion also relies on an inaccurate stereotype of what smart looks like. In practice, you are as or more likely to see an Ivy-level academic talent that looks like a leader than not.
> Its rare to find lesser academic talents who will have better extra-curriculars than the best academically inclined candidates.
I'm confused. You seem to be suggesting that extra-curricular activites are in fact an accurate indicator, contrary to the SAT proponents?
>I'm confused. You seem to be suggesting that extra-curricular activites are in fact an accurate indicator, contrary to the SAT proponents?
I'm unsure how you arrived at that conclusion. I'll chalk it up to me being unintentionally unclear.
What I am saying is that its largely a fallacy that Universities are commonly put to the decision of a more social candidate versus a more academically talented candidate.
The more common reality being that the leading academically talented candidates are as or more qualified in their extra-curricular participation.
At least within a deviation of academic and social metrics that is meaningful.
Selectivity of admissions allows for selectivity of curriculum. Selectivity of curriculum allows for better trained / educated students.
As well as tailoring of education to meet a student's ability, both on the high and lesser ends.
You may as well ask what the purpose of special education or gifted programs are. To put in in the terminology of those commonly concerned with the plight of haves and have nots, the answer is educational justice.
Last, maximizing the education of elite academic performers tends to maximize results for the nation in the real world in a manner that raises the living standards for have nots.
> What I am saying is that its largely a fallacy that Universities are commonly put to the decision of a more social candidate versus a more academically talented candidate.
> The more common reality being that the leading academically talented candidates are as or more qualified in their extra-curricular participation.
I have no particular objection to this, but doesn't it imply that the SAT requirement is superfluous, with the combination of grades and extra-curriculars adequately measuring what the colleges want to measure?
> You may as well ask what the purpose of special education or gifted programs are... the answer is educational justice.
I don't feel that's an answer. It's just a couple of words that sound nice.
(I was in a gifted program in junior high school, by the way. In retrospect, it's not clear to me what purpose it served, other than to separate us socially from other students. Maybe it wasn't a very good gifted program, but I did live in a fairly well-off school district, so I don't think that was from lack of funding. In high school we had Advanced Placements courses, which are obviously more practically useful, though I wouldn't place them under the category of "educational justice".)
> in a manner that raises the living standards for have nots.
That's the issue. It sounds nice, reminiscent of the Rawlsian difference principle, but empirically I'm not seeing it in the world. What I see is largely self-enrichment of the minority, without much regard for everyone else.
>I have no particular objection to this, but doesn't it imply that the SAT requirement is superfluous, with the combination of grades and extra-curriculars adequately measuring what the colleges want to measure?
No. You are making an unfounded judgement call that grades and extra-curriculars adequately measure what the colleges want to measure, in total.
>I don't feel that's an answer. It's just a couple of words that sound nice.
It's a developmental clinician's perceptive (myself) that has its root in the long standing educational and clinical view that curriculums should be tailored to meet student ability. The most obvious every-day example being in the special education classroom (which enjoys the protection of hefty federal law), and which is also mirrored in the less obvious gifted programs.
>I was in a gifted program in junior high school, by the way. In retrospect, it's not clear to me what purpose it served, other than to separate us socially from other students. Maybe it wasn't a very good gifted program, but I did live in a fairly well-off school district, so I don't think that was from lack of funding. In high school we had Advanced Placements courses, which are obviously more practically useful, though I wouldn't place them under the category of "educational justice".
You can't see the purpose of a child with a 150 IQ having a unique curriculum apart from other students? That may or may not be you, but it doesn't mean that it isn't someone. Controlling for any lack in your specific gifted program.
Unless highly organized and driven, the average admissions non-advantaged (no affirmative action, etc) successful Ivy candidate is likely 140 IQ+. With 150 not being uncommon.
There is an ethical parallel to providing these individuals with a unique curriculum and providing one to special education students.
>That's the issue. It sounds nice, reminiscent of the Rawlsian difference principle, but empirically I'm not seeing it in the world. What I see is largely self-enrichment of the minority, without much regard for everyone else.
That's because you lack context on the history of living standards and poverty.
> You are making an unfounded judgement call that grades and extra-curriculars adequately measure what the colleges want to measure
Unfounded? I don't think so. After all, I've gone through admission myself. Anyway, what do you think they want to measure?
> curriculums should be tailored to meet student ability
> having a unique curriculum apart from other students
I agree wholeheartedly. However, our school system doesn't provide that. Our system isn't even remotely in the vicinity of that. We still rely mostly on social promotion based on geography and age, with age groups sometimes divided into 2 or 3 rough subgroups. I'm not impressed. I think it's questionable how much if any value that provides. It's classism rather than individualism.
> the average admissions non-advantaged (no affirmative action, etc) successful Ivy candidate is likely 140 IQ+. With 150 not being uncommon.
"likely"? Is that just your speculation, or do you have empirical evidence? I know that IQ tests are not required for admission.
I'm not a fan of the notion of "IQ". I consider it a kind of pseudoscience. I don't think I've ever taken an IQ test myself, though I don't recall exactly the criteria for admission to the aforementioned gifted program.
> That's because you lack context on the history of living standards and poverty.
Mmmkay, thanks for playing. I'm done here now. Congrats on the smugness, hope you enjoy it.
My school's gifted and talented program contained the top 10% of students, or IQ 120. Anything more restrictive would not be politically acceptable or practical.
> Why even send students to school, if test scores are "totally" in the control of the student?
Because the tests measure knowledge, and schools are intended to impart knowledge.
As an analogy, my physical fitness is totally in my control: if I work out more, I'll build more muscle. But you'd never say "Why are you even going to the gym if your fitness is within your control?" If my local gym is really trash or I can't afford one, I can still do pushups on my own or go for runs, but nobody would argue based on that that gyms are worthless.
Likewise, schools are (or should be) built for students to learn. Students can learn in other ways, too, and any kind of learning will be measured on these tests.
The fact that other means of learning exists, though, doesn't mean that schools aren't important or useful.
> As an analogy, my physical fitness is totally in my control: if I work out more, I'll build more muscle. But you'd never say "Why are you even going to the gym if your fitness is within your control?"
This isn't a good analogy. A gym is a mere building. I wasn't referring to schools as mere buildings, the walls, the halls, the roofs. I was referring to schools as the places where the students meet the teachers.
> Students can learn in other ways, too, and any kind of learning will be measured on these tests.
How successful do you expect most children would be with entirely self-directed learning? No teachers, no tutors, not even parents. That's what I meant. I wouldn't expect that to work well, with only rare exceptions. Students — who by definition and nature lack experience, lack knowledge, are ignorant — need guidance, and thus the quality of the schools, the quality of the teaching is crucial. Nothing is totally in the control of the student, nor should it be, for the student's own good.
> I was referring to schools as the places where the students meet the teachers.
I think for any gym with personal trainers, this is still a pretty one-to-one analogy.
> How successful do you expect most children would be with entirely self-directed learning? No teachers, no tutors, not even parents. That's what I meant.
Ah, I think I might have been missing your point here -- essentially does it boil down to "If tests are all that we're measuring, what's the point of all the grading and process that schools go through", to which the answer is presumably "Tests aren't all that matters"? If that's the case, we probably agree here (in that learning is the thing that matters, and schools might perform a lot of functions which don't map to test scores, but might map to better learning).
The schools and education offer students a tools to achieve good scores in SAT. Some do better, some do worse. On average I doubt most students are capable of self-learning or sufficiently directed towards it at that age.
Were you objectively more deserving to go to college than a kid with stellar teacher recommendations but lower scores? You might think so, but others would disagree. When I hire, I choose a trusted colleague's referral over the candidate who happened to cram best to do binary trees on a whiteboard.
> When I hire, I choose a trusted colleague's referral over the candidate who happened to cram best to do binary trees on a whiteboard
I love it that you make your candidates go through binary trees questions on a whiteboard AND are totally dismissive of it at the same time. That's totally not a waste of everyone's time.
Who grades the standardized tests? Besides multiple choice there's subjectivity in grading. Even with multiple choice there's some subjectivity for questions like "What's the best word choice".
I remember taking the SAT and ACT, and didn't notice any multiple-choice question which didn't have exactly one right answer and three unambiguously wrong answers. They put actual effort into making sure this is the case.
Isn't this patently obvious that dropping the SAT is entirely about creating pretext for continued discrimination against Asian applicants?
In 1996, California repealed affirmative action via Prop 209. At the UC Berkeley and UCLA, considered the 'best' of the UC system, Asians represented 25-30% of the student base. Studies and fear-mongering at the time showed that a repeal of affirmative action would imply that Asians would become 90% of the enrollment based on the admissions factors used.
The UC system dismantled its admissions framework, and yet despite moving to a 'softer' framework, Asian enrollment at UC Berkeley rose to 65-70%, which is the case today.
Now the ithe same thing happening, but on a national scale, 27 years later. It's about time!
The reality is on any quantifiable, OBJECTIVE framework, Asians and to a lesser extent, whites, have been shown to be discriminated against. The only way to sustain this, especially in light of the pending ruling from SCOTUS likely banning affirmative action policies at Harvard et al... is to dismantle any external, objective framework for measuring applicants.
Chief Justice Roberts said it plainly: "the only way to end discrimination is to end discrimination."
My question is, if you eliminated race - 'banned the box' on applications, what would the outcomes be? Answer is self-evident and that's the true reason the SAT and test scores in general are going away. "a rose by any other name".
I'm white, my wife is Asian, our kids will be applying to university over the next couple of years. We've started to have the conversation about which race they will check off on the application. I'm coming to the conclusion that they have to just check white, as this means they will face less discrimination than if they check Asian. This makes me very uncomfortable, and also just seems absurd.
Under no circumstances should your children let the university know if they have Japanese, Chinese, or Korean heritage. They will discriminate against them. That was the case 14 years ago when I was applying for college and it has only gotten more acute since then.
They say that they don't discriminate, but it's an absolute lie.
I believe you can check any race and they will never question it. You could state you identify as Black and so long as the name and application looks 'black', they'll never know. You'll start your first day at university and what will they do, ask you to take a genetic test?
As a thought experiment couldn't you just say your from South Africa. Thus being "African American".
For the record I hate affirmative action, but I also hate the notion of having some elite 10 schools everyone strives to get into. You can do just fine going to a state school, and you'll probably have a much more relaxed experienced.
You can also do what I did and hit 100k no degree at all. With all this talk of student loan forgiveness, maybe we need to rethink the role of college.
It doesn't need to be an automatic first step into adulthood, you can learn a great deal working for a few years beforehand.
Holy shit, my wife's a Saffa and I'd never considered the fact that it means my daughter technically has African heritage in her.
Sadly, I can't imagine it being much use when she's old enough to go to university. Most of the (African) black people in Australia come from recent migrant backgrounds, are fairly religious/conservative and believe strongly in education. I suspect they'd run into similar problems to Asians if we had the same affirmative action policies down here in Aus.
Friend who’s a white South African did exactly this. Ended up getting a full ride. First day let’s just say OMED didn’t know how to handle it and just brushed it off.
There are no elite schools that systematically discriminate against Asians.
Zero.
None.
Let me add a few points that counter some folks who think that schools do discriminate against Asians:
- Some schools do give preferential treatment to Black and Latino/an applicants. This is not a particularly good look for the schools, imho, but it’s the reality. This is not the same as discrimination against Asians. Not declaring a race or declaring white does not help with this. Note that schools give preferential treatment to many groups (e.g., recruited athletes), and race is just one of them.
- I see many folks arguing a case for discrimination based on differences in test scores and grades between different races. If those were the only criteria for admission, then I would agree with them. Like it or not, those are not the only admissions criteria that are used at elite schools. Just because the system isn’t what these folks think it is (or possibly should be), that doesn’t make it racist.
- The cases of Stuyvesant and Berkeley having an increase in Asian admissions once rules/laws were changed are accurate. The part that they leave out is that the systems changed (almost) purely to some combination of grades and test scores. So I wouldn’t call this necessarily an improvement in fairness, but it definitely was in increase in transparency and move to a system that seems to be (at least currently) more favorable for Asian applicants.
- Note that the lawsuit against Harvard was sponsored by a folks who are anti-affirmative action. This wasn’t some charity move towards Asians. Imho, it was an attempt to use one minority group as a weapon to strike against other minority groups. Note that I think that affirmative action has its flaws, but it’s not the villain many folks make it out to be.
- Imho, and this is just my opinion based on many anecdotes, I think that the narrative of “elite schools discriminate against Asians” is often used in Asian American communities by folks who don’t understand or just can’t accept that their kids are not strong applicants in the elite school applicant pool. The argument I most often hear is “… but perfect grades and SAT scores”, and this shows me that they really don’t understand what makes for a strong elite school applicant (e.g., recruited athlete, having done something of impact at a national or international level, etc.). I strongly encourage you not to feed this narrative, especially to your children. There is enough real discrimination against Asians in the US — we don’t need to make up additional sources that aren’t real. Note that this phenomenon is not unique to Asian-Americans — I’ve heard equally incorrect narratives from White folks in the NE corridor that (imho) serve an equivalent function.
- To help your kids, familiarize yourself and them with what is evaluated in admissions at the schools they are interested in. As a simple example, Harvard rates applicants on athletics even if they are not a recruited athlete. Also note that 15% of Harvard undergrads are varsity athletes; and something like 35% of white undergrads are varsity athletes (not all recruited, but probably rate 1 or 2 in athletics). Not to push athletics, but I think that a lot of people are surprised by these numbers, and it provides some insight into why some seemingly less qualified students are accepted over “perfect grades and SAT” folks.
- The article below provides some good insights into Harvard admissions. I honestly don’t think that they go far enough in explaining how impressive the folks who get 1s in any category actually are. That said, these types it things are good for college applicants and their parents to know, and many don’t.
- Lastly, note that some schools actually don’t get enough high quality Asian applicants, and they not only get favorable admissions treatment as an underrepresented minority group, but these schools will also throw scholarship money at them like there is no tomorrow. I know of one specific very good (R1) large state school in the Midwest that does this, and I imagine that there are many more.
Best of luck to you and your kids. I’m sure they will be fine.
Don’t stress about the race issue. Focus on things that actually matter (e.g., location, access to desired major, social fit, etc.).
It sounds like you're buying into Harvard's argument that "asian applicants are systematically less likeable / weaker in intangible attributes" which is racist nonsense in my opinion.
> It sounds like you're buying into Harvard's argument that "asian applicants are systematically less likeable / weaker in intangible attributes" which is racist nonsense in my opinion.
Please don’t put words into my mouth that I did not say (and certainly don’t think).
Note that I had a positive experience living in Asia for 9 years, and I am currently active in Asian communities in Asia as well as the Asian-American community. If I felt for one second that there has been any actual systemic discrimination happening, I would be all over it, and I would speak out loudly against it.
Clearly I haven’t found any plausible systemic discrimination.
Regarding the “Asians being weaker” in some areas argument, i think there are two sides of this argument.
First, using Harvard as an example, 25-28% or so of the entering class is Asian. Given that Asians-Americans are about 6% of the US, this hardly smacks of systemic racism. Something doesn’t add up with this argument.
Second, I hear people say something like “ah, when you control for grades and test scores, Asians are accepted less frequently”. This is pretty much true at every elite school whose data I have seen.
So is this racism? Maybe, but I’m guessing not. Two courts who basically did a full body cavity search on Harvard also did not find any discrimination (note that if the Supreme Court overturns these decisions, it will be based on labeling affirmative action policies as being actively discriminatory against Asians and Whites, not actual direct discrimination against Asian applicants).
What I will say, based on hundreds of data points, is that Asian parents of kids who apply to elite schools (esp. those who don’t get in) routinely emphasize grades and SAT scores over all else. As I mentioned in my original reply, this is just living in denial about what the actual application process is. It’s much more than grades and SATs.
Check out the article I linked to above - applicants really want one or more 1s (and these 1s are tougher to get than this article makes it out to be) or pretty much all 2s with nothing below 3. The people who complain loudest about elite school admissions are typically scoring 5 or 6 in one or more categories while not getting a 1 in any. I have no idea why they are surprised that they were denied.
Some additional comments:
- The most likely discrimination that an applicant will face is at their own high school. High school counselors and teachers can be petty tyrants, and ambitious students can be screwed by high school counselors and teachers if they do not play their cards right. It can be a very political process.
- For folks who think that they were “almost there” and didn’t get in due to being Asian, I ask them this — were they waitlisted? If not, they were not even close.
- If someone is a strong applicant to elite schools, they will get into at least one. There are some weird things like rough quotas from certain high schools that may make it seem arbitrary for a specific school, but generally this is a known issue if it’s an issue. There is plenty of room at the bottom of each entering class for strong applicants, so these schools aren’t randomly turning away highly qualified applicants for meaningless reasons like race.
- I have an open offer to people who think Asians are discriminated against in admissions. Show me their application (or give me a lot of details), and I will tell you where things went south. 100% of the time people have done this, there was a glaring gap in their application. In the event that I somehow don’t find a gap, my next inquiry would be about their references (one bad one can ruin an applications, and some applicants get blindsided). If you have any examples, please post here. I will be happy to comment.
>First, using Harvard as an example, 25-28% or so of the entering class is Asian. Given that Asians-Americans are about 6% of the US, this hardly smacks of systemic racism. Something doesn’t add up with this argument.
There's a larger percentage than the whole population of the US, but a smaller percentage than the percentage who apply and have similar qualifications to accepted students who aren't Asian.
What you're seeing is that Asian-Americans are better qualified, but not enough of them are accepted as one would expect from being better qualified.
> What you're seeing is that Asian-Americans are better qualified, but not enough of them are accepted as one would expect from being better qualified.
Please reread my entire comment.
I covered your thesis, and I am fairly certain that it is an inappropriate characterization of the reality.
Specifically, every study I have seen that makes this claim determines that Asians are “more qualified” based exclusively on a comparison of SAT scores and/or grades.
Grades and SAT scores are only one factor of many that are used in admissions decisions.
As I have said before, some folks may not like that more than grades and SATs are used in admissions decisions, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Let me give you an example of a profile I see a lot:
- 800 math 780 verbal on SAT.
- Top 5 in class taking a strong academic curriculum. Not valedictorian because of a few differences of a + or - here and there attached to their straight As.
- Played instrument in band and marching band for 4 years.
- Wrote articles and took photos for school newspaper and yearbook.
- Volunteer in school volunteer group that actually did some decent work.
Using the guidelines in the link below, how would you rate this applicant?
1. Academics — solid 2. Definitely not 1, since there is no indication of “genuine scholar” like published research or a Westinghouse award or something similar.
2. ECs - Squarely 3. Did some stuff, but no leadership or substantial impact.
3. PQ — Let’s say 2, but this could be a 3 if their school does not know how to write good recommendations for elite schools and/or if the applicant did not impress the right people. Note that there is nothing about low SES or other challenging conditions that might make them a solid 2 or even a 1. Frankly, in our case, it doesn’t matter.
4. Athletics — Marching band is basically a sport. Let’s say 3. If they were just in band, that would probably fall under ECs, and this might be a 5. Note that there is no expressed desire to be in the Harvard band, and there is no quality measure (like winning a competition) that suggests that they could be good enough, so 1 and 2 are out of the question.
So… is this person an admit?
Probably not. This is almost a perfect “standard strong” — nothing wrong with them, but nothing stands out. Note that their grades and scores only got them a 2 in academics, and there are a lot of other 2s out there in the applicant pool.
They probably won’t get in unless they have some other highly desirable trait like geographic diversity, racial diversity, recruited athlete, director’s list, or child of faculty.
Anyway, I hope that people stop perpetuating the myth that “better qualified Asians” are not being accepted. A more accurate statement is “asians with higher grades and SAT scores are not being accepted because they are not excelling in other areas that are explicitly mentioned as part of the evaluation process”.
Note that those folks (Asians and otherwise) who have good grades and good SAT scores as well as excel in other areas are much more likely to be accepted.
> Grades and SAT scores are only one factor of many that are used in admissions decisions.
The other factors were added specifically in order to give universities leeway to massage the demographics of the incoming class. IIRC this kind of holistic admission was invented specifically to be able to reject Jewish applicants who tended to be academically strong but less "well rounded" than WASPs. So ivies effectively put a cap on the Jewish quotient by creating the holistic system.
The original push for diversity was successfully implemented by Eliot (president before Lowell).
Lowell definitely twisted the implementation and took it in a twisted direction (notable that his beliefs were more widely held than Eliot’s), but all of that was (relatively quickly) undone by Conant (president after Lowell), and a push toward more diversity in the manner of Eliot was continued.
this is chilling. thank you I guess for completely dropping any pretenses here. this system of well-roundedness was, as other people have alluded previously, invented to exclude high achieving ethnic groups ( as per the perception of the in-group ) from overrunning elite institutions of learning. this system is being employed to cap Asian admissions.
There is no cap on Asian admissions, and there never will be. The Asians that get rejected at the margin have similar profiles to White people who are rejected at the margin. If you think that this is incorrect, then I would love to see some supporting evidence, There is an abundance of available info due to the lawsuit, and none of it seems to have pointed to discrimination against Asians.
Diversity steps were taken by Eliot in the 1800s. Lowell took them in a dark direction, but he wasn’t the originator.
I’m really saddened that so many people are quick to jump on the “Harvard bad” bandwagon without actually knowing the facts or the history. It an incredible story
The current admissions process at this point is fairly refined, and the evaluation rubrics are public knowledge, and I think they do a fairly good job of getting the school the wide variety of students it needs.
It is, and if it isn't, then it's discrimination based on heritage.
>note that if the Supreme Court overturns these decisions, it will be based on labeling affirmative action policies as being actively discriminatory against Asians and Whites, not actual direct discrimination against Asian applicants
No, it will be that they found affirmative action policies as discrimination against Asians, and that is direct discrimination against Asian applicants. Saying "well you were just a box I ticked the wrong way because you are Asian" does not make it less discriminatory.
So schools have subjective criteria that disproportionately impacts one group of students, but it’s fine because that’s the rules and they are following it?
> So schools have subjective criteria that disproportionately impacts one group of students, but it’s fine because that’s the rules and they are following it?
I don’t think that the criteria are quite as subjective as you think. Anything on the margin, especially if it will make or break an application, will be discussed and evaluated at a reasonable level.
Most people are getting downgraded because of complete omission of one or more evaluated areas.
For the past few decades, elite schools have been very clear that they are looking for more than good grades (which themselves can be highly subjective) and good SATs in applicants. As mentioned in the article I linked in my first reply, Harvard actually lays out their exact rubric.
If someone, Asian or not, decides not to participate in sports and doesn’t really have a good reason why not (e.g., had to work after school), they shouldn’t be surprised by their low rating in this area, and they better be highly rated (as in, a 1) in one or more other areas to compensate.
The schools don’t maintain these criteria in order to exclude a certain race of people. They maintain these criteria because they think it’s good for the school long term.
As a simple example, so many of the people who disparage athletics as a component of admissions have no idea how important being a varsity athlete can be after graduating — I call it a totally-not-club club because it has such an invisible but significant influence.
Lastly, I will add that it is almost impossible to have an evaluation system that yields an equal outcome for all races that isn’t a pure lottery. I know the lottery idea is popular on HN, but I think that this is overly dismissive of what makes the strong elite school applicants strong both when they apply and after they graduate. Imho, other than 10% or so of each entering class, it’s not that they are brainiacs — it’s that they are smart enough and can get interesting shit done.
"they really don’t understand what makes for a strong elite school applicant"
I think it's pretty clear that even if they did understand what makes for a strong elite school applicant and refocused their energies on meeting those criteria en masse, these elite schools would change that criteria, because the criteria are a means to an end.
> these elite schools would change that criteria, because the criteria are a means to an end.
That’s a nice opinion you have.
Do you have any evidence to support this?
The case against Harvard showed us pretty much everything behind the curtain. If there is any systemic bias against any group, that must be the best kept secret in the world.
“Don’t be fooled by those using the Jewish quota of the mid-20th century or charges of discrimination against Asian Americans (also despicable when true, but which the lower courts convincingly found was not the case here) as an excuse to limit the inclusion of Black and Latino students at selective universities.”
"Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university."
… yet somehow a district court found no reasonable claim of discrimination, and the appellate court upheld that finding.
Imho, this article is an example of how the NYT has gone off the rails with their agenda-based spin on reporting.
The article flat out says the following:
“Harvard said that the plaintiffs’ expert, Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke University economist, had mined the data to his advantage by taking out applicants who were favored because they were legacies, athletes, the children of staff and the like, including Asian-Americans.”
All of those can influence the personal rating positively.
This lawsuit is an attempt by anti-affirmative action people to end affirmative action. They are using Asians as a figurative cudgel to beat other minorities, and this saddens me.
Fwiw, I think affirmative action is not without flaws and could be improved (e.g., I struggle to see why Asians aren’t given affirmative action status at these universities similar to how Asians have this status with the federal government — there has been and still is oppression and discrimination against Asian Americans), but I think there are large swathes of the country that are still in favor of this policy.
Removing legacies/athletes/staff is a reasonable step to take, since each of those fall into a separate pool of admits. Harvard also had higher thresholds for sending recruitment letters.
"This lawsuit is an attempt by anti-affirmative action people to end affirmative action"
That's an ad hominem attack that does not address the claims on merit.
I personally think fairly evident that Harvard et al are essentially attempting to address systemic inequalities in access, while also maintaining a large pool of legacy (ie donor) admits. Whether or not this is "fair" or "unfair" is actually not something I have a strong opinion about. What I do find abhorrent is the unwillingness to admit that's what they are doing, choosing instead to claim that asian kids have a harder time getting in because they have worse personalities.
> The whole contention is that these measures are not objective, and that they're biased in favor of certain groups.
And it's a silly contention. The SATs were invented by American WASPs. Yet the group that does extraordinarily well, Asians, are the most recent immigrants to the country, from places that have the least similarities (in terms of language, culture, political knowledge, etc.) to American WASP culture.
It's only silly to the extent that you collapse the argument down to the design of the test itself, and not all the circumstances that go into the administration of the test across the country.
Your argument makes no sense because as the comment you are replying says, when you drop the shenanigans, the universities get full of Asians. If what you say is true, they'd become full of rich people of any race, common denominator being the richest you are the likelier you are to be there. But instead what happens is hard working Asians are admitted.
Universities should optimize for the best students.
If your a priori belief is that every group (however defined) has the same merit then every measure of merit is biased except 1. a coin flip 2. some form of group quotas.
Standardized tests are the least-bad way to measure merit. We should try to make them better, not get rid of them.
It seems like there is an inherent contradiction in logic at play.
If you believe that racial disparities result in real harm to certain groups, you would expect the impacts of those harms to show up on objective metrics of capability.
The only way to have a measure blinded to the impacts of inequality is to ignore everything about the individual being measured. Perhaps everyone has equal potential and capability at birth, but everything after that is tainted by their unequal environment.
In 2021 or so, the UC Berkeley chancellor sent out an email to students and alumni (that's me) cheering an increase to racial diversity in the incoming class following them dropping the SAT requirement. The timing of that change was uncannily close to the failing of Prop 16 in 2020, which would have repealed prop 209 of 1996 and was publicly endorsed by the UC administration.
Back to the email, it showed before and after charts. Asian percentage dropped sharply, and all other percentages rose.
Outside of the UC system (which doesn’t have as much emphasis on legacy/donations) I don’t think it’s about anti-Asian discrimination as many might think. I just think Asians are the most adversely affected by non-meritocratic admissions.
Legacies and big donors are much more likely to not be Asian. The other well-off white upper class is getting admitted based off all the holistic extracurricular/volunteering/etc bullshit. And there are secret quota systems for other minority (not all racial) groups. Then there are athletes, needing representation across academic disciplines to match teaching capacity, etc.
Basically, I think middle class Asians and white people who fit the “high scores, want to study stem” paradigm are just figuring over a very small pie when it comes to selective university admissions. Within this group Asians dominate (because demographically they make up a large portion of high scorers) but outside of it they are not as likely to fit into any of the other admissions buckets.
If admissions were based purely on test scores and academic achievement, yes there would be more Asians and less underrepresented groups, but most importantly it would completely shake up which white people get admitted, which is what the admissions system cares most about.
How could whites be discriminated against if Asians would rise to 90% of the accepted population? There aren’t enough underrepresented minorities at selective all combined to get Asians to 90%. That is most of the pool that Asians would take is from White students. From a pure counting perspective, more whites get in over “more deserving” Asians than any other group (assuming your numbers are accurate).
Based on this Whites are the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action (by numbers), even if blacks are by ratio. There just aren’t enough blacks at these schools to make that much of a difference of scale.
I was incorrect about the 65% of Berkeley as Asian. It's 30.6%. Note this is double the percentage as the Ivy League schools - and it's based on a framework that was specifically developed as a way to get around the 1996 ban on affirmative action.
I still believe the only explanation for eliminating clear, measurable and quantifiable metrics for university admissions is because universities are looking for discrete ways to continue discriminatory tactics against Asians and to a lesser extent, whites. This is not about legacy admissions practices.
"Berkeley diversity statistics show that the enrolled student population at the University of California, Berkeley is composed of individuals who identify as Asian (30.6%), White (25.4%), Hispanic or Latino (16.3%), Two or More Races (5.5%), Black or African American (2.42%), American Indian or Alaska Native (0.139%), Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders (0.132%), and Other Pacific Islanders (0.132%)."
I still don’t see how it’s discrimination against White students. This actually looks more like discrimination against Asians, with Whites being the biggest beneficiary of the discrimination based on the numbers. Blacks get the biggest bump, but it is Whites who “steal” the most spots.
It does make me wonder about the marketing of anti-affirmative action. For example you see on social media the kids who posts about their great grades and scores and not getting into the Ivies. The common refrain is that some black kid got their spot due to affirmative action. Although it’s actually more likely, if the applicant is Asian, that it is a white kind who got that spot due to affirmative action. I wonder how public perception changes if they knew that reality?
> I still don’t see how it’s discrimination against White students. This actually looks more like discrimination against Asians, with Whites being the biggest beneficiary of the discrimination based on the numbers.
Because you are looking at it through the lens of total student makeup of certain top universities.
If Whites need 100 points higher on SAT than some others, then Whites are being discriminated against. That is, if you remove only the discrimination against Whites then they do better in the current system. If Asians need 200 points higher on SAT and you remove all discrimination then Whites do worse at some top universities than currently. So Whites would be both being discriminated against and for at those certain universities.
If you look at the overall college system, there's something like 35% of undergrads that are Black/Hispanic and 5% for Asian so in the overall system Whites net benefit more from no discrimination than Asians do.
So you've picked a particular point of view between principled and subjective, global and local, to conclude Whites aren't being discriminated against. Maybe it's worth exploring why.
> If you look at the overall college system, there's something like 35% of undergrads that are Black/Hispanic and 5% for Asian so in the overall system Whites net benefit more from no discrimination than Asians do.
I don't understand this. The vast majority of colleges are uncompetitive. If you apply and can afford it, you get in. Affirmative action is only relevant at competitive colleges. For example, at the totality of the UC system, it's only 4.5% Black, 22.5% Hispanic, 22.2% White, and 32.2% Asian. It's in these schools Asians get the benefit. Whites and Blacks were the two groups hardest hit by the elimination of AA in the UC system.
And I'm OK with this personally. I just think the AA narrative that it is Blacks that took that Asian kid/s seat is misplaced -- it was more likely the White kid who took their seat.
> I just think the AA narrative that it is Blacks that took that Asian kid/s seat is misplaced -- it was more likely the White kid who took their seat.
And at the schools that are very good the Asians that couldn't get into the best ones are taking those spots from others. But you've excluded those colleges from your calculus for some reason.
People generally apply to several schools and may not get accepted to all of them, majors have limited number of spots, scholarship are limited, and so on. If the College Board subtracts 100 from every White person's score they'll apply to or get accepted to lower choice colleges, and this is effectively what race-based affirmative action is doing.
When you have systemic discrimination like affirmative action the whole system is affected. It seems like you don't believe race-based affirmative action causing White kids to get accepted to their 3rd choice instead of their 2nd is fine since you're pretending it doesn't happen.
I'm not following your logic at all. If our logic is that merit evenly falls between every racial group and the enrolment of schools should match demographics, then Asians are still over-represented and both blacks and whites are under-represented. So Blacks and whites took both era spots.
If the idea is that current test scores without affirmative action represent true ability, then nobody took eachothers spot, what you describe is true fairness, only 22.2% of whites and 4.5% of blacks deserve to be in school.
Is the idea that blacks deserve affirmative action, and Asians do, and Hispanics do, but whites don't, so any instance of them benefiting from AA is whites stealing from blacks? I just don't quite follow.
Asians are 43%-53% depending on how many who identify as 'International' are Asian. Whites are 19.7% and Blacks are 3.4%
You are right, however, about why schools want to eliminate the SAT. SAT optional admissions is a way for schools to admit students whom would have previously been considered unqualified. By increasing the pool of eligible applicants, the school is discriminating against the previous population of qualified, top tier students, which has been historically an Asian majority. Additionally, Asian students with low or no SAT scores will not benefit from these changes because the best Asian students will continue to submit high SAT scores. How many Asian students are going to be accepted without an SAT score when they're being compared to other Asian students with 1500+ SAT scores?
Note, colleges should not discriminate based on race. But they are under no obligation about their acceptance criteria. They could just use SAT tests if they wanted. Or just grades, or it could be a lottery. Or it could be the best dressed, or who could pay the most. Just because you don't use a mechanism that favors a specific group, doesn't mean that you are discriminating against them (necessarily). For example, most don't use height in admissions, but it doesn't mean we're discriminating against people from the Balkans.
I agree that certain people are racist / jealous towards Asians because we are smart and can get ahead in a generation even when we start far behind some other people, but UCB is a state school located in a area that has a lot of Asian population.
Maybe I'm old or insufficiently woke, but I don't see legacy or identity as substitutes for demonstrated learning. I see the decay of rigor and achievement as signals of decline of excellence and the crumbling of knowledge. The mythology of "everyone needs degrees" created a wealth transfer scam and a lowering of standards to sell more student loan debt for sheepskins. Maybe we need to throw away arbitrary employment requirements and make universities run on merit. Oh and there's a gender imbalance in most undergraduate programs where the bar is effectively higher for women because men aren't keeping up or have been left behind.
“Legacy” applicants is the opposite of woke, it’s been how the “old boys network” has run for hundreds of years, getting under qualified students into top Universities.
That's an urban myth perpetuated by people interested in generalized grievance. At least from the period I attended prep school, and beyond. From the mid-1990's.
Almost in-total, the "old boys" applicants are not under-qualified. When compared to almost any kid that attended lesser secondary schools than the privileged kid attended, on average.
These kids have almost always proven themselves in elite educational environments. Most of those who skate by in such environments don't go Ivy. They will instead attend one of the many more numerous elite Liberal Arts colleges that most others ignore but that carry almost equivalent cache.
There are no Stuyvesant valedictorians missing Ivy admissions. In the same vein, there are plenty of prep school kids who do. I've only rarely seen underqualified kids go Ivy, and the only one that I can actually think of was a poor kid.
Today, Ivy's are skipping qualified lesser privileged kids for diversity. In eliminating the SAT/ACT, they are essentially gambling that their reputation rather than their student body will continue to qualify them as Elite. Over time, I have doubts. The curriculums will have to be adjusted so as to avoid the pall of racism or classism that will occur when wildly divergent grades become apparent.
If they are so qualified, why not let them compete on the even ground with the rest of the applicants? Why is there a need to special track them via legacy?
Legacy should have been abolished long time ago. It’s the epitome of systematic racism.
Possible! But my previous answer was based on the "If they are so qualified" scenario. The important takeaway is that the legacy special track has a reason to exist whether or not they let unqualified students in.
You seem to have missed the point of my prior post, and you misunderstand how legacy admissions work. Dropping the rhetorical nuke of "systemic racism" doesn't cover for that. Read my prior post again.
Legacy gets one looked at. Its not an automatic admission.
Unlesss you are simply stating that legacy admissions should be disqualified (this would be ridiculous), then also consider that:
you may be making the "research" error of uncontrolled variables that include the fact that legacy kids are likely to be smart, their parents are astute enough to track them in a manner that makes them better candidates on average, and that their parents are more aware of the process that they can relate to the child.
Al leading to a statistically significant rate of legacy admissions that has nothing at all to do with unfairness.
Legacy boosts admission rating. That’s all needed to be said.
It's systematic racism because legacy admission has been part of the official admission system for the longest time. It's a system to favor the incumbents, the riches, the powerful, and the non-minority.
I'm not that familiar with the US legacy system but even if it is just "we'll definitely take a look at your application" that isn't competing on even ground is it?
It might not guarantee you a place but it's clearly an unfair advantage.
No one is disputing the fact that there are advantages to being legacy, at least in terms of giving the application a hard look so as not to unduly disappoint donors and other people in the "club" that is the entire reason that non-legacy candidates want in.
Versus say a public school (American) candidate who gets filtered out earlier because they graduated in the middle of their class.
I don't recall anyone promising anyone else a perfectly even playing field down to the most minuscule detail.
The people arguing that point seem to be demanding a social standard and then working from the assumption that it is a shared standard, value, and may even be the law. None of which is true.
But the more important points are at the end of my last post, which point to the fact that people arguing against the rate of legacy admissions haven't a leg to stand on without first controlling for obvious variables.
> I don't recall anyone promising anyone else a perfectly even playing field down to the most minuscule detail.
Neither do I but that doesn't mean that we should make trivial changes to even the playing field where possible. Especially when that trivial change is just to stop doing something that is very obviously unfair.
At this point I'm guessing you or your children benefited from the legacy system and don't want to feel guilty about it because I can't really imagine any other reason to defend the system. It's very obviously unfair, and there is very obviously no good reason to keep it (other than money of course).
> people arguing against the rate of legacy admissions haven't a leg to stand on without first controlling for obvious variables.
You don't need to do any statistical analysis to prove it has an effect to know that it is unfair. Like, if you took fair dice and then sanded one side slightly, you don't need to actually do any actual analysis to know that you shouldn't do that because there are no possible good effects and one possible bad effect.
This is typically what legacy admits tell themselves to cope with the fact that they do not deserve to be there. But it has no relation to reality. With the data that Harvard tried so desperately to hide, we can confidently dismiss these false claims
You were the one who started suggesting that "legacy" was "woke", which you are not. Now you seem to have switched to defending it.
Legacy isn't fairness "down to the most minuscule detail" it is a significant part of admissions procedures, written into the rules. It would be reduce the complexity of admissions to simply throw out all legacy-related text. If it indeed provides no help to those legacy students, surely that's a win-win for everyone?
I actually disagree that the first is true, in and of itself. If you have two otherwise identical candidates except one is a Legacy candidate, then the answer is (tautologically) no, having a parent does not make you more qualified. But it's also true that that being a legacy gives that student an advantage, even if its limited to just getting put at the top of the pile to be reviewed. And if a segment of the population has been historically barred from attending these institutions, then I think it qualifies as an "unfair" advantage.
Calling it "systematic racism" may bring with it a lot of other cultural baggage at the moment, but I think fundamentally we can at least agree that Legacy Admissions are a way of preserving the status quo, in opposition to social mobility.
I also went to an elite prep school except it was the 2010s. You're right that the kids there prove themselves. The top ~15% of students there would have found the top universities under-challenging, except maybe MIT. The top 50% would've been on par.
But guess who got into the top private universities from that prep school, not the top students. Most were legacy, donor families, or really crafty liars. So overall I would consider the prep school kids going into top private schools under-qualified (public unis are different), though not exactly because they're from prep school.
All of this debate about what measures should be used to gatekeep higher education ignore that the US system is only loosely about teaching students; the goal of an American university degree is class differentiation.
There is not a shortage of textbooks or qualified teachers who could explain calculus or history or economics. As a society, the could easily produce far more educated people (and for a lower cost), but that is not the goal of a degree. The diploma -- especially from an elite school like Columbia -- first and foremost is a signifier that you deserve entrance into an upper middle managerial class. Unless the goals of higher education are teaching (or god forbid actual job training), the entrance requirements will always be arbitrary enough that class lines can be sufficiently preserved.
I feel the same way. Imagine if Harvard had the ability to enroll one billion students per year. There would be no need to use either grades, SAT score, personal essays or anything else to reject students. They would be able to accept everybody, and then everybody could get an elite education and society would be so much better off.
But that would never happen. The whole point of ivy league is that they are exclusive. Companies get to feel special when they hire an ivy league grad so they can feel special for having one of the special chosen ones. If everyone gets to have an ivy league degree, then the ivy league degree becomes worthless.
In a loose sense this is the accepted purpose of a degree, not just as an education center (theoretically motivated peers in addition to the teachers), but as a stamp of "we have given you education in X and deemed that you learned/retained enough of it". I don't know that many school do it well, but some universities can claim that they have much more rigorous programs than others and so students going there will come out better educated (I studied abroad and the mathematics standards at my host school were just nonexistent).
Anyone can pick up a math book and start teaching themselves, there's no doubt about it - but any form of third-party verification of this is very high effort on a case-by-case basis.
> The diploma -- especially from an elite school like Columbia -- [is] first and foremost is a signifier that you deserve entrance into an upper middle managerial class
I think that while this take is largely accurate, it's incomplete. Substitute "upper middle managerial class" with "enlarged access to professional employment" -- not a huge leap -- and you can see societal benefit for aggressively modulating the gatekeeping for inclusivity's sake.
Otherwise it's just the usual cynicism which is always effective for maintaining the status quo.
It's interesting to compare this article with MIT's explanation of why they reinstated the ACT / SAT requirement [1]:
> At the same time, standardized tests also help us identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness . This may seem like a counterintuitive claim to some, given the widespread understanding that performance on the SAT/ACT is correlated with socioeconomic status. Research indeed shows some correlation, but unfortunately, research also shows correlations hold for just about every other factor admissions officers can consider, including essays, grades, access to advanced coursework (as well as opportunities to actually take notionally available coursework), and letters of recommendations, among others. Meanwhile, research has shown widespread testing can identify subaltern students who would be missed by these other measures.
I totally agree. I was an SAT high tester in an unsupportive home. I was not a good student. I had actually flunked a grade in elementary school though they let me pass. BTW, I ended up as a principal level at Microsoft.
When I tested 99.9 percentile in Verbal and 97 percentile in Math my father's only comment was, "Who ever thought you could test like that?" Snicker, snicker.
I'm disgusted by this decision. You HAVE to let kids have a way of knowing they have capabilities when for some reason the environment blocks that.
Your anecdote is that you weren’t a good student, but you tested well and you credit that as having unlocked success in your career.
I have 2 anecdotes of high school students who earned near perfect SAT scores, were terrible students in high school, barely passed their undergraduate courses and are struggling to maintain careers in tech.
My point is that standardized testing is a measure of potential. But a college must gamble on a bad-grades, high-scores student. The payoff for a college might be better if they target higher grades with slightly lower scores. Not every student lives up to their capacity and the transition away from home to college isn’t an easy one.
My preference is to build more colleges and let them choose their own entrance criteria. Also, adults should do far more to help high school students understand how much social status, marketing, and press relations do to make some colleges appear far more prestigious than they are.
As an Asian person, I think it's a cultural thing.
There is this old joke about how even if you are a one-in-a-million person, there are still 8000 of "you"s to choose from; how does one chose who to pick, if there aren't positions for all of them?
So how do you make it "fair"? Since of the number of seats are limited, so imagine if the cut-off for the last seat is for someone who is in the 90.3765335th percentile, look at how many significant digits that is! (Yes, that's how specific it can get, when population sizes grow large enough.)
Yes, you can argue about having a "bad day", but there are thousands of other people ALSO in the same percentile as you, and you all didn't have a "bad day", at some point it's about resource limitation.
There are two and a half billion Asians of different varieties, that means MILLIONS of people at each economic/social strata. You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource.
If there are limited number of seats, and your economy cannot afford to fund more seats, then a standardized test is the only fair way, at least it allows you to have SOME sort of control at your luck.
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That same thinking applies to Asians who move to the US. It's patently unfair, from their PoV, to give weightage to things they CAN'T control for (race/wealth etc.) and not give weightage to a thing they CAN control for; a standardized test.
I come from a poor Asian immigrant family, and this SAT shit seems wild. My parents always told me that America is an easy country to succeed in. Just do decently in school, ace the SAT, and boom full ride to a upper middle class life, no matter the background.
I don't know what your definition for "ace" is, but I did pretty well. That was my peak. Ever since has been dealing with barrier after barrier, which often seem actively hostile. I suppose that some would chalk my failure up to laziness, but everyone that I've seen overcome those barriers had access to mentors, contacts, connections, and opportunities - resources that don't come my way. Too black, too short, too gay, too quiet, too whiny, too weird. Maybe I just I trip people's gut alarms?
Granted, most of my peers who received a full ride seem to be doing fine. For millennials, I guess your parents gave decent advice. When I look around today, though, I feel less like a one-off loser than someone at the vanguard of a socioeconomic reality where even coming out of an education with no debt weight isn't a guarantee of a clean and unencumbered launch. Increasingly, superficialities - affinity, attractivenes, imminence - are the criteria. Which means that playing by the old rules, going forward, is foolish.
I sometimes wonder where I'd be, with my dark skin (et al.) and high scores, in a country that cared less about the former and more about the latter. But, here, socially, I don't know what I'd have to do to beat out an Asian or white candidate.
This is what puzzles me. What is the intent of the SAT, is it to assess aptitude for something? Is that something the desire to achieve good grades? Is it intelligence? Is it the aptitude to fire guns in a tank? For sure if you have a test that tests something, then you assign outcomes based on that assessment, then anyone has the opportunity to understand what is being assessed and practice until they are good, but what does that tell you?
I don't doubt there's a correlation between some aptitude that measures propensity for success and SAT score, but I'm still struggling to see how that benefits the poor or the migrants in general? In truth, it benefits a narrow section that "fit the mould" that is expected by success on a SAT; that is, members of the notional outgroup that do the SAT in the expected way can benefit, those that don't still fall by the wayside.
There are very many intelligent people that for whatever reason - cultural, bad parenting, poor education - still fall to achieve this mark of success. Is that acceptable? I think there's at least scope for saying that maybe a SAT is not the optimal strategy for finding all those that would benefit most from higher education. I've no idea what is, but there seems to be some very strong opinions here that don't seem particularly intent on seeing the bigger picture.
It's supposed to test a combination of intelligence and work ethic, and it does an OK job at that compared to everything else while being the hardest thing for established and/or wealthy students to game.
> I'm still struggling to see how that benefits the poor or the migrants in general
Maybe there can be a better way, but today the options are SAT or no SAT. How can a smart, poor student who goes to a bad high school (e.g. my dad fleeing Iran) stand out other than the SAT?
the point of standardized tests, is from what I understand, getting some sort of "objective" ranking, not for the purpose of intelligence per se, but to have a number so that when there is a cutoff, no one complains because everyone had (ceteris paribas) had an equal chance of getting in that cut-off, if they had worked hard enough.
In countries like India, the test like JEE are really absurd, because the competition is just that tough. Just any sort of question that fits in the syllabus is thrown in, because what else can you do?
In countries like the US, where things are a bit less stressed, they can try to attempt to perhaps gain some secondary data, by testing reasoning or what not.
but in the end, it's just a way to rank "fairly" to create cut-off, to look too deeply into it is not worth it, that's the job for your regular school education.
> but in the end, it's just a way to rank "fairly" to create cut-off, to look too deeply into it is not worth it, that's the job for your regular school education.
Except, presumably, when there are debates about how the tests benefit or not one particular cohort?
Tests seem to be the cheapest, timely (OCR-marked tests can be marked quickly) and most equitable (in comparative terms, not absolute terms) way to gauge people when you have a lot of them.
Any other methods increases cost and time, and introduces subjectivity, which creates issues of its own.
Not sure if America an easier country to succeed in, but I do believe it's a RICH country (with a high GDP per capita), i.e. it can afford to fund more colleges, imho, which means the competition is less.
Not just colleges, but colleges with prestige, there are a LOT of American college at every prestige level. The supply is rather high.
I am really impressed at the Land grant college schemes, for example. Really funneled a lot of money into the creation of colleges all over the country, not just in the populous cities.
> You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource.
It depends what the "resource" is. If it's the mix of prestige and the individualized attention of highly impressive scholars that you get at elite colleges, then of course not. If it's simply high-quality educational content plus some average-quality tutoring, that's a scalable resource that could be provided to many more people at very low cost.
I get the gist of your comment, but isn't prestige kind of the point (at least partially)?
If education was the point, you don't even need to spend money for cheap local community colleges, you can get a very good education from MOOCs like Coursera (I am doing one right now, in fact), edX, heck youtube even.
But the whole point is that an organization is staking their prestige against your qualification. There wouldn't be a barrier to entry in the first place for the MOOCs, so the point wouldn't even arise.
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I know the HN commenter base prides itself of favoring "experience" over "qualifications", but let's be honest here.
When they are both starting from fresh, a "traditionally qualified" person would have access to more opportunities, because the barriers are lower, which is what parents are aiming for, and the more prestigious the qualifying authority, the lower the barrier.
You've articulated this very well. It's something I also have for years believed as a non-Asian person that has become a "conceptual framework" (my words...probably inadequate) to better understand Asian co-workers now and co-students back in my school days (to unfortunately generalize here). For me at least it really does explain a lot of the cultural differences that lead to lazy western stereotypes.
So many examples of casually thrown around of borderline racist-ish terminology/dog whistles..."tiger parents", "hard working"...all the "model minority" stuff.
It really is a population density issue...which leads to resource scarcity...as a westerner all you have to do is interact personally with someone from India or China where you have millions of people competing for a seat at a university and it becomes pretty clear how you get the "Asian work ethic".
That's part of it, but as an Asian American immigrant myself, the stereotypes aren't really far off. "Tiger parents" is an American characterization of how Asian families are generally structured: parents (who have knowledge and life experience) dictate to kids (who lack both). Dating and relationships are discouraged (freeing up huge bandwidth for studying) while marriage is expected (heading off the tendency for extended adolescence). "Hard working" is a byproduct of being not that far removed from subsistence agriculture. "Finding yourself" is discouraged. "Carrying out your role" is encouraged.
These are cultural adaptations to an environment that's very different from America. My dad grew up in a Bangladeshi village, where people who didn't work literally didn't eat, and the vocational choices for 99% of people were "subsistence farmer." I don't think the words "fair" or "unfair" were ever uttered in my house. (And it drives me nuts when my American-born kids say that.) In America, these cultural traits become positively adaptive, because most of the competition isn't trying as hard. It boggles my mind how many Americans don't study for the SATs, but do have iPhones.
The SAT assumes a baseline vocabulary and familiarity with basic logic, which a lot of kids don't meet now that so many people take the test. My score went up by 120 points from my first practice test in 8th grade to the real thing in 11th grade, but some of that was just covering the ground on the expected high school math and vocabulary.
As someone who is (I think) on rayiner's side more or less, my impression of the evidence is that the SAT and similar tests (even IQ tests) can be practiced for to an extent, and scores can be improved, but only up to a "natural ceiling". So, while it should be possible for a while to improve everyone's scores on the SAT by providing test prep, you shouldn't expect everyone to be able to score near the upper limit on the SAT, just higher than they would be without test prep. Test prep has diminishing returns (unless that test prep is effectively cheating because the test questions and answers have been leaked) because the upper limit of a person's score is limited by their natural potential. The end state for the SAT, assuming the test isn't changed, is to produce a distribution more or less like a bell curve, but with a mean higher than before widespread test prep (and possibly some groups disproportionately improving compared to other groups, but not necessarily reaching the exact same mean as the other groups).
I'm not in favor of eliminating the SAT. I don't necessarily believe that SAT prep is materially impactful (I think it improves scores, but not, like, up a tier of selectivity). But all of the SAT improvement factors available to well-off families certainly do materially improve scores; those improvements include not just SAT prep, but also taking the test multiple times, having your results tracked by family and being forced to take the test multiple times, and disability accommodations, which are rampantly abused.
Low SES families are not taking the SAT on a level playing field with high SES families.
My roommate in undergrad (State university) many decades ago was an Indian guy. The whole "asian work ethic" stereotype: Driven, hard working and brilliant. It dawned on me really early on that there were probably 20 million people his age in India and out of them all, he was one of the (relative) handful to pass all the gatekeepers and come study in the USA. Whereas I had a mediocre GPA and SAT score and basically out of laziness applied to my home State's university only and got in because of my address. Super early and instructive lesson on white (and American) privilege.
This happens in the US too though. We have about 10% as many people, so for undergrads, it’s really just ~ one more level of applicant filtering than we have in the US.
I would do a very very selective 1st round, eg a college with an intake of 1000 would admit 10 people who are special in some way, so you can get that kid that is head and shoulders above everyone else.
For the other 990 spots, you make a minimum bar of achievement (lots of As, high score, whatever) and put everyone who meets it in a lottery.
The lottery system would be bad for the image of the school, who probably want to be seen as meticulous pickers of talent. Though I wouldn't be shocked if there were some lottery mechanics being applied by school admins behind the scenes
As I replied to another comment, lottery doesn't achieve what (Asian) people really want; an attempt to control destiny, some sort of idealized version of fairness and justice.
It's one of those things where people kid themselves that it was all them. To some degree it's a useful fiction, we can't be going about being all gloomy about our prospects.
But it also creates a heck of a lot of stress. What your parents think of you, how they talk about you to their friends, is going to depend on this test. On top of it all, you're not even really learning anything, you need to spend the time learning the test.
isn't a (limited) exam stress a worthy tradeoff compared to life-time stress from uncertainty of sustenance?
Because that's what Asian parents would say, stress a bit now, be sure of an income for a lifetime.
obviously, I am not going to discount that stress does not scale well and that for children, who do not have the maturity to deal with it all, exam stress and peer pressure could lead to devasting outcomes...
but asian parents, who have long since forgotten their one-time exam stresses, but face daily stresses from inflation etc, would argue that it's worth it in the end, since they would be comparing themselves to their old classmates who didn't make the cut and are worse-off than them.
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The exam themselves to tend to be absurdist, but when the seats are limited, and "fairness" is still required... asking candidates to do a special dance might be the only alternative left.
Yes, that is exactly what they say. I've heard it many times since I am one of those kids.
But they don't really think about how to deal with the fallout if things don't go well. I mean sure, tell the kid it's important to do well, but don't put everything on passing the test. I've never heard any strategy for what to do in case it doesn't go well. You'll destroy the kid's confidence and possibly his friendships too if you make it about your worth as a person.
also, wages (and respect) for employees are already limited, and the lower down the "totem" pole you are the worse it gets. parents don't want to imagine such a scenario, even if they have moved to the US where despite everything, things are still much better, minimum wage wise.
Most such standardized tests, atleast now-a-days, are objective-MCQ type questions that feature heavily on certain core stem subjects as Maths, Science etc.
This is partially to allow examiners to create a bank of questions that can be rotated around easily, and also to create easily markable exams that can be OCR-ed automatically and don't require manual markers.
(I think the SAT English essay is an outlier, in most countries these sorts of subjective questions are simply not a part of standardized test, at least for competitive tests like University Entry)
I think it's hard to argue an MCQ marginalizes anyone.
"You simply CAN'T provide the same resource to all of them, some of them will have to vie for a lower-ranked resource."
Why not just distribute those resources via lottery? Why not actually just split resources evenly across the population? There are good practical reasons not to do this, but they are, fundamentally, ideological (eg, we might feel it is inefficient to spend resources on someone which may not provide as much productivity as someone else). It serves nothing to pretend these things are inevitable.
It makes sense to evenly distribute resources in elementary schools, but that’s not what is being’s discussed here.
You could give me the same violin lessons as a virtuouso, and stick a functionally-illiterate Michelin-starred chef in my favorite calculus series, but doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time.
"doing so would be a complete waste of everyone’s time"
I simply don't believe this. Playing violin is virtuous even if you aren't a virtuoso and knowing about calculus is virtuous even if you're a Michelin starred chef. Its certainly true that the situation you describes may not be an _efficient_ distribution of resources if all you care about is productivity, but there are other ways to think.
The only reason I was able to break into programming was because of high standardized test scores. The SAT and others like it really are a great equalizer. Dropping the requirement is a shame.
If you said any other career except programming I'd agree with this, but programming is literally the least gate-kept of the high-paying careers. Anyone can break into programming, all you need is the internet, interest and aptitude to understand code.
In my country at least, having friends or family with a foot in the door is pretty essential to landing that first interview. You still need to demonstrate competence, though.
I think the newness of software engineering relative to more traditional professions like medicine, law, and even other kinds of engineering is a large part of the reason why gatekeeping is less of a barrier. Given enough time, though, I'm sure this will change for the worse.
It is the least gate-kept, but it's still gate-kept. The higher-paying SWE jobs all want a college degree and have an blatant preference for new college grads. You can get such a job without a degree, but it's much harder than getting into college in the first place.
I do think it’s hard to break into initially — if you are approaching it from any other industry (such as what I did), it can take a few jobs to make the leap into a high paying career.
Edit: not trying to derail what you had said either, just a comment
> Anyone can break into programming, all you need is the internet, interest and aptitude to understand code.
If by "break into programming" you mean getting any decent paying job, it's even easier than that. I'd say it's closer to "show up on time having showered and be able to code yourself out of a paper bag".
Employers should embrace standardize testing: we're on the cusp of a revolution in education driven by the tireless personalized tutoring and feedback of LLMs
Of course not all schools are ending testing, MIT for example:
I had a professor in grad school who had studied how admissions inputs correlated to various measures of success (which is of course a fraught subject of uts own). This was a while back though I assume not much as changed. As I recall, standardized tests followed by some sort of adjusted class rank were the best predictors while a lot of the softer stuff like interviews and letters of recommendation were pretty close to worthless. I expect schools could drop some of the more time-consuming softer stuff with very little impact on the admissions process.
In MIT's case it probably is especially important to assess certain types of skills, because someone who doesn't have a reasonable math background for example is going to have a bad time. (Though problems doing math is a surprisingly common theme in higher ed including at the grad level--even with programs you wouldn't think were especially quantitative.)
It’s not a mistake, that’s for sure. I’ll be more blunt since a lot of other comments in this thread beat around the bush: higher education institutes are removing objective admissions criteria so that they can admit less qualified minorities on subjective grounds.
1) They're trying to get ahead of a Supreme Court ruling, which will likely rule Ivies are discriminating against Asian candidates.
2) Elite cultural zeitgeist is in favor of discriminating against Asian and non-elite white candidates.
3) More subtly, the top Ivy admins are overwhelmingly Jewish, and they've likely received push back from Jewish alumni/donors, as Asians have displaced smart-but-unremarkable Jewish candidates. A recent Tablet article alluded to Asians displacing Jewish candidates, which has been an unreported theme in the Ivies over the last 20 years.
Money presumably. There's an extremely strong incentive for educational institutions to spend their long term reputation on short term financial gain by setting high fees and giving everyone a high grade. Basically everyone loves it except people who already graduated.
And maybe employers, but employers tend to do their own tests because of the difficulty of comparing external test results across time and institutions.
Well, on the one hand, student applicants want to feel that "I am not a number, I am a human being."
And admission committees put a lot of time and effort into trying to discern qualities that go beyond some numbers of the page to admit a qualified but diverse student body (for reasons both good and arguably bad or ineffective).
Employers used to have standardized tests for all sorts of things. The tests enabled a lot of upward mobility for people to pursue occupations that did not require college degree. If you could show aptitude in a test and had at least a high school education, they'd take you on and train you and you'd have a nice career.
However, certain groups sued saying that "equality of outcome" is more important than "equality of opportunity". They argued that if the outcome of a test showed intersectional differences, then the test must be biased. They succeeded in pressuring the various trade groups and industries to get rid of the tests or be sued into oblivion.
The trade groups that offered these tests realized it was just easier to require college degrees as a proxy instead of having their own specific tests and having to deal with these pressure groups. This is why many occupations these days require a degree when it seems like that should be unnecessary.
This slammed the door to upward mobility for many that the pressure groups were claiming to try to help.
Or, what a private employer tested was not necessarily a fair standardized test, given they are a private entity that could do whatever they wanted, not part of the public education system that has to adhere to all kinds of annoying standards.
Just because something claims to be fair doesn't mean it is.
It was a Supreme Court case, Griggs vs Duke Power, in 1970. Since then, employers cannot use IQ tests or standardized tests, since they were deemed discriminatory against minorities.
This case says something different though. It says you can’t use a test that doesn’t relate to the job, regardless of if there’s intent to discriminate or not.
A standardized test that tests your ability to do the job is still allowable — presumably even if minorities fare worse on it.
This case is the whole reason the "disparate impact" phrase exists and its had a chilling effect on employment testing. If you're a large FANG company hiring programmers, you risk testing (validating someone can write code), but if you don't have the pocketbook and legal team, there is not much incentive to put your company at legal risk of being sued. This is especially true when you can just use "college degree in X required" as an extremely inefficient and costly proxy for what could have been a test. And we wonder why tuition is so high.
But even small tech companies do coding tests. I don't think its a function of large pocketbooks. Rather I think that they found tests that correlate more to the work done on the actual job.
This misses the point. The point is that the process is the punishment. The process is that these groups will sue over and over again until you give in.
If you read the explanation I do think that makes sense in that they are very clear that it is specifically the _math_ portion of the SAT/ACT where they see the value. And generally I agree with that, especially as a threshold (as opposed to a fine ranking).
It was similar when I applied to grad school (this was engineering). They told us pretty unequivocally that getting a perfect GRE math score was pretty much required, but that the verbal went right in the bin, so don't worry about it.
It makes sense for engineering focused schools or those applying to engineering schools. I'm still less convinced places like Harvard where a good chunk of the students won't take a ultra-difficult math class during their time there has much use in the SATs. At least in the "I got a 1580 on my SATs but someone with a 1570 got in over me, how is that fair?" Kind of way.
As an aside, that is so well written, and I love the use of inline citations that expand right where the reader is versus jumping to the bottom. It feels so natural that I wish all publications did that.
I think an important thing to note is that the university of California Academic Senate (not exactly a body that is seeking to overthrow liberal narratives) conducted a review on the effects of eliminating the SAT, and concluded that eliminating the SAT would disadvantage non-asian minorities. They then voted unanimously to keep standardized testing, but were overruled by the UC regents, who made their decision based on no evidence at all, resulting in UC dropping standardized tests.
One obvious difference between how the AVSAB and SAT are used is that the minimum score on the AVSAB is ~ 35th percentile (somewhere around a 980 on the SAT). That kind of score is likely all-but disqualifying at Columbia, where the 25th percentile is 1450, and only 5-6% of applicants are accepted.
The question is not “does the SAT provide some globally useful measure of college performance,“ to which the answer is “very probably yes”; instead, Columbia is asking “does requiring it help them identify top tier talent from underrepresented backgrounds rather than filter out top talent from those backgrounds”, to which the answer is “quite possibly not”. They aren’t banning it as a factor, they are just permitting those with a low score to omit it.
And lest I sound like I’m cheerleading elite universities here, I suspect there are enough people with >1500 SATs and family incomes <$50k that you could fill 2 whole Columbias. They’re obviously going to keep admitting legacies and other high donor value applicants because they’re mostly trying to maximize return on investment.
I live in a society with free education for all, up to and including university. To make that possible, there are a limited number of seats, and the number is based on the needs of society, and on our government's budget. The seats are allocated based on testing, but there are multiple ways to "test into" a seat, i.e. "you missed it this time, but go do another two years of pre-university and you might get in later".
This is the best we can hope for: a transparent system, with clearly defined multiple pathways, and a limited number of completely free seats at the education table.
Also: one thing which other systems miss is different maturity. If someone is bright but at 15 does not see the point of studying and prefers to smoke with the stoners, fine. At 18, get a job in retail, and perhaps at 20 the light will go on and they will realize that there's a way put of retail hell and they are smart enough to test into university with night prep classes.
Largely free (taxpayer-funded) at all levels but if you want to go into the best schools you better bring in your A-game because entrance requirements it to sit series of 4 hour long tests graded anonymously. You don't have to pretend to be a native American competitive rower who plays the trombone, but you need to know how to calculate Fourier series by hand.
Forgot to mention: I suppose this only works in high trust societies.
Citizens are sometimes dissatisfied with individual outcomes, but there is no groundswell of resistance to it because people generally believe the system (both the educational system, but also the entire economic system) is fair.
If there's a limited number of seats, it's not "free for all". (Of course, there's no way around inherent class size limits under any system, other than MOOC's which are quite different from actual real-world college classes.)
All education at all levels is free for all. If what you are capable of contributing to society to support your family is plastering, your plastering training is free.
Sigh...
Isn't it obvious? The affirmative action wall is about to be breached by the conservative court, for better or for worse. If not by the current two cases brought by SFFA, then it's only a matter of time. The dropping of the SAT is the same reason Princeton et al. pulled out of the USNews rankings: they fully intend to continue AA, and they need to cover as much of their tracks as possible by not requiring people submit incriminating data that can be demanded in court once the policy is declared illegal.
I agree with the article. The SAT is a chance for any student, regardless of background, to demonstrate academic skills and the ability to succeed. I was one of those students -- my SAT score got me a full merit scholarship. I wasn't as polished or accomplished as other students around me, but I was able to show that yes, I am smart, and that I can succeed academically at the college level. I did go to a korean after-school program to help study for it though.
I feel like instead of dropping the test they could provide free resources to students to prepare for it. At least get them familiar with the structure of the test and encourage them to do the best they can. A lot of kids like those in the article would stand to benefit.
The only winner from getting rid of the test is rich, stupid kids that don't do well regardless of how much prep they get. They then go on to cheat and BS their way through college and use their network to land jobs. Poor and disenfranchised students will continue to be marginalized.
Maybe I'm missing something because you and the author seem to agree, but I think schools are moving toward test-optional applications, not test-ignored. So it still could show that a student is excelling. Right?
I think the author is missing an important point: like many young people, he was smart but undisciplined. If he had gone directly to college from high school, instead of into the military, he probably would have performed as badly in college as he did in high school. He needed more time to grow up and mature. The SAT is irrelevant to that natural fact.
If you're not self-disciplined, then college can be even worse than high school, because you have more personal freedom in college. For example, if you skip classes in high school, you're in big trouble, but if you skip classes in college, they just shrug, cash your tuition check, and give you an F. In college, the adult supervision is largely absent. You're expected to be an adult and supervise yourself.
The military accepts smart underachievers because the military is going to force you to work whether you like it or not.
I didn't join the military myself, but it took me until age 24 to become self-disciplined. Although I was smart enough to get into college, I wasn't psychologically ready for it at 18, and I dropped out at age 20. I had a great time partying for the first 2 years though. ;-)
> if you skip classes in college, they just shrug, cash your tuition check, and give you an F.
Depends on the college. A friend of mine who went to an “elite institution“ struggled to supervise themselves and got set up with a counselor to keep them on track. I’m not certain this was actually in their best interests, since they’ve spent most of their late 20s and early 30s struggling to apply to med school but missing deadlines.
The key part that is glossed over is that Columbia is making SATs optional, so if a candidate is amazing in all ways except they are a poor test taker, they do not have to submit a test score.
And the author also tries to correlate SATs with the Armed Forces aptitude tests, the latter which weeds out those at the far bottom end of aptitude versus making hitting a high bar a requirement for entry. Once in, recruits are judged by other means. And while what he says is true about how poorly those low scoring recruits faired, a big reason they died at a higher rate was that they were assigned to infantry at a higher rate, so were more often put in harms way.
Finally, why do we assume the SATs are fair? I was fairly good at the SATs, but would have been awful if they had required spelling, grammar or were fill in the blank versus multiple choice. Should I have a leg up over everyone because I am good at what it tested? I chose not to submit SAT 2’s for writing for that reason (timed essay writing for an hour in pen was a truly awful experience).
> Should I have a leg up over everyone because I am good at what it tested?
Yes, that’s a feature not a bug. The SAT doesn’t test randomly. It is designed to test for specific subjects and knowledge in those subjects.
I’ve SAT is not fun but I think it’s purpose is to fairly test all takers and rank them to assist with allocating educational resources.
It’s such an odd question to ask “should I get a leg up because I got an A in chemistry and someone else got a C?” There are many reasons that make trades hard to get. But the idea is to compensate for them as best as possible and not dwell on the fact that any merit system will not be completely fair.
I think the point might have been, you can be excellent at chemistryy, a real value to society with your ingenuity and rigor, and be no good at all at writing about chemistry.
A test like that would be fair if it were testing for journalists.
Maybe every job needs at least a little bit of rounded basic skills like that, and so it's fair for the test to include some the same way. In that case I see no problem there either.
But I don't know how out of balance the commenter is talking about. Was the test they are thinking of totally wrong or did it just include the appropriate portion of basic rounded literacy/competency, and if they sucked at it, then that was exactly the job the test is there to do is to guage those weaknesses?
I think we can all agree there is no such thing as a perfect test, but at the end of the day we need some sort of objective metrics if we want a merit-based educational system.
"Poor test taker", without fail, is a bs excuse for people who are lesser academically talented but cannot bear to admit it. With a couple of exceptions that I list at the end.
Doing well on these tests is absolutely as important as all of the other ways that these candidates are amazing.
It is as irrational to highlight amazing performance in other areas while discounting sub-par performance in standardized testing. Just as much as it would be the inverse.
These tests lend insight into, and serve to balance, the "amazing" or "underperforming" metrics in these other areas that may be in fact be more a measure of the relative quality or relative competition within these other areas.
In my opinion, the only two factors that are likely to truly affect test scores beyond innate / developed talent are: time management and the timeline of natural cognitive development.
If time management is an issue, then it will be an issue in college as well. If it is an issue because of uncontrollable factors, then the student should seek help to have other arrangements made that will enable them to eventually do well on the test.
Some people truly don't cognitively bloom until their early to mid twenties. One indication of this might be signs of talent with underperforming grades. Other strategies are more appropriate than having them flounder at an elite University at eighteen years old.
As one of the comments to the article mentions, a lot of this dropping of standardized tests is likely being driven by the fact that the Supreme Court will likely rule against affirmative action for college admissions. The colleges want to remove as many objective measures of student achievement as possible to allow them to pick and choose they type of students they want.
The US is the only country in the world where standardized testing improves the performance of low-income students. In most parts of the world standardized testing is unfair to the poor. But in the US the rest of the system is so unfair to the poor that standardized testing helps rather than hurts. It’s basically a consequence of funding schools by property tax and having GPA requirements above the maximum possible at certain schools because the bonus points courses aren’t offered everywhere.
It’s about the connections, not the content. It’s about being with a cohort of people that can play at your level and share ambitions. Rubbing shoulders with rich kids who are average isn’t as useful as you make it out. Rich people will invest in smart kids that have the prestige of a top university with or without their own kids being connected to them.
The SATs may not be fully fair, but they are definitely more fair than any other means of judging college applicants.
Extracurriculars can make a very mediocre student look amazing, and if you pour enough money into sports, student organizations, community organizing, arts, etc, eventually one of them might pan out as sounding impressive. Middle class and poor kids won't have opportunities like that, while rich people can keep spending until their child seems unique and interesting.
I finished high school with a 2.2 GPA and my SAT score was 1380. I was a terrible student, and I hated being in school, but somehow I did really well on the standardized test. That got me into the community college.
Standardized tests equalize things. It's everything else that should be banned, because all of those steaks get manipulated.
Lot of great stuff in there, but here's one quote:
> Richer students don’t just get better SAT scores. They also tend to outperform on everything else that an admissions committee would use to select students. Personal essays? Their style and content are more strongly correlated with family income than SAT scores are. Recommendation letters? They are subject to teachers’ classist and racist biases, and even knowing how to request the letters requires significant social capital.
There is this belief among some, that the wealthy have an advantage when it comes to standardized tests such as SAT. This isn't true. Correlation isn't causation. You can't use your wealth to buy SAT scores. The best SAT tutoring available is Khan Academy, and it is free.
In my view it might be possible to distribute resources to a greater extent by making it explicitly a lottery. For instance, a college could assign a "score" to each applicant, using their existing process, but then deliberately add a certain amount of random noise to the score. Socially, everybody would know that acceptance was decided by a combination of "merit" (by whatever measure) and luck.
The degree of randomness could depend on the school. For instance, community colleges accept virtually 100% of applicants anyway, and a random factor would not change anything.
I realize that the argument here is isolated to testing, so perhaps instruction is out of scope, but it reeks of a sickness I see all over education: so often we don't bother teach, we merely filter.
Is this coming from a different place by the sort of person who has good-but-but-top grades and top standardized test scores, but thinks they deserve a look by elite universities? However, they can't say that so they point to a theoretical disadvantaged student who is somehow elevated by taking the test?
Fundamentally, the question is whether the SAT does what ETS wants you to believe it does, that it provides an objective assessment of a high schooler for college admissions. The claim is a correlation to the first year grades. Beyond that, it's mainly correlated to IQ and social class (professional class scores best IIRC).
Contrast this with the situation in other countries that rely heavily on testing, such as Ireland. As I understand it, the subjects are tested and the test grade is used instead of subjective markers of academic performance. Students are allowed to choose their university course based on priority derived from these test scores. This seems like a much more likely way for a poor Irish kid to arrive at Trinity college than for Harvard to notice and pluck out a poor American kid, if they even bothered applying.
In principle, SAT scores enable people like me, who were very very good at such tests, to break into elite schools.
In fact, test prep works well enough to enable a shockingly high percentage of legacies and donor brats in elite schools.
Ending SAT use in admissions might enable a more balanced approach to admissions, but it does not broaden access to elite schools. They could increase class sizes, or they could get rid of legacies and donor admissions.
Standardized tests are designed to be as non-gameable as possible. They're definitely less gameable than the other admissions criteria still used in elite colleges: admissions essays, playing obscure sports, fancy extracurricular experiences, etc. Most studies find SAT prep confers very limited benefits to the average person.
Having an essay essentially written for you by an expensive consultant with contacts in admissions departments is undetectable and widely practiced. But when it comes to standardized tests, many wealthy families get so desperate for good scores for their kids that they engage in criminal conspiracy (recall the Varsity Blues scandal in 2019).
It's extremely hard for me to see how, when you remove the least gameable aspect of admissions, that it gives the rich less of an advantage. I'm almost certain it gives them more of an advantage instead.
The SAT is way more gameable than the College Board would have you believe. Most coaching is not very effective, but there is a group that is very effective. It’s almost by design that they aren’t very popular.
That said it is less gameable than most of the rest of the process. Family wealth and income are probably less gameable, but many schools are need blind.
Skeptical is putting it mildly. I'd give you better chances of having a secret proof of the Riemann Hypothesis than producing miracle educational results at scale (even if it is just on a standardized test).
They are being so vague that’s it’s impossible for us to know, but they didn’t say “at scale”. You’re certainly correct that there isn’t some secret sauce that we could just apply to everyone. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a service that costs (high) 5 or 6 figures per year that could substantially increase test scores.
Though I would imagine such a service would have to take place over months/years and not days/weeks, and that kind of blurs the lines of whether it even counts as test prep at that point.
14% of Harvard undergrads are legacies. It is exceedingly unlikely that SATs help a higher percentage of deserving but otherwise overlooked applicants.
My point is, there is a way to have a far higher impact on opening seats for kids who should be getting an elite education than the question of whether SATs help or harm attaining that goal. They're not really serious until they don't preference legacies.
> 14% of Harvard undergrads are legacies. It is exceedingly unlikely that SATs help a higher percentage of deserving but otherwise overlooked applicants.
I don't follow. Are you implying that the first sentence is evidence for the second? Do you think legacies are getting in via high standardized test scores? I don't think that's true. If standardized test scores were a major determinant of admission, these schools would be 2-3x more East Asian than they currently are. And virtually none of those students would be legacies. The Harvard admissions case showed all this with evidence from Harvard's own admissions data.
Additionally, the article cites a study saying that SATs do in fact help "deserving but otherwise overlooked" applicants.
> My point is, there is a way to have a far higher impact on opening seats for kids who should be getting an elite education than the question of whether SATs help or harm attaining that goal. They're not really serious until they don't preference legacies.
I agree with you that elite schools do not explicitly prioritize the talented poor. My impression is they prioritize (1) the powerful, (2) those who possess or can afford expensive class signals, (3) those who will donate money, (4) racial balance, (5) high achievers. Standardized tests allow students who can't get in via Categories 1-4 to sneak in via Category 5. Even these students tend to be of higher socioeconomic class, but to a lesser extent than Categories 1-4.
In my opinion, the only way to do better than standardized tests would be (standardized tests) - (all the non-academic mechanisms that privilege the rich) + (explicit priority for the talented poor). But these second and third terms will never happen, so standardized tests are better than nothing.
It is hard for me to understand those who support standardized tests being discarded along the way to a more fair admissions process. As you point out, there are much more obvious ways to achieve that first.
All dropping standardized test does is grant them the ability to discriminate.
There are going to be special cases and examples of unfairness in any system, and so you can find cases where a standardized test resulted in an unfairness, but the alternative is only 100x worse.
The alternative is not "Without the burden of these inflexible uncaring mechanistic tests we can serve each precious flower better and leave no one out."
That is only the sales pitch.
The alternative is actually nothing but "Now we can discriminate."
I sometimes wonder if rich people pay tutors to test prep their stupid children simply because they don't want their kids knowing they only got into a good school because of corruption.
To get into Jesuit High in New Orleans, you need to have parents with money, no criminal record, and a pulse. The average student ACT score there is 31. That's the 95th percentile nationally. Those kids get great educations and have involved parents, but they aren't averaging 31s due to merit unless you're counting their parents' wallets too.
That looks to be about the equivalent of 1400 in the SAT. An ACT of 31 is more aligned to Tulane’s admitted class than Harvard’s. (Tulane is a top 50 university, so still “a good school” relative to the entire population of 18 year old high school grads.)
I've said this before: read the small print. The SAT (or similar) is no longer required to become admitted to Good School(tm). The donor class that subsidizes those without other means to attend the Good School(tm) have been explicit in their contracts: They award on test scores. Has the SAT (or similar) really become not necessary?
Not sure I agree with Peter Hitchens, but he wrote a book (A Revolution Betrayed) about Modern, Grammar and Comprehensive secondary schools in Britain which digs into a lot of this as it feeds into the colleges systems in both countries. It’s a good book for getting your head around the problem.
I'd be curious to see a good school most the opposite direction. Admit ONLY based on SAT or SAT+ACT or something. Effectively allow students an "instant acceptance" option. I highly suspect that this "SAT-Only" group would be competitive across most or all metrics.
Would you like to provide an example then? Government inequality please, I’m not interested in hearing why you believe a private party should be obligated to give you anything.
It’s not about being obligated or private parties. It’s just simply pointing out that not everyone has equal opportunity. You can start with access to prenatal health care, which literally starts before birth. And then you can find inequality of opportunity all the way up through life — from differences in water quality, school quality, access to money through inequality in banking access, access to high quality foods, etc….
This isn’t about the causes of these issues. But it’s obvious that not everyone has the same opportunities in childhood. It seems odd that you’d even question this.
Like I said, I’m not interested in hearing why you believe other individuals should be forced to pay more money to things that would benefit you. Do you have any examples of government inequality? For instance, does the law require that a white student with the same SAT as a black student be prioritized?
We were talking about inequality of opportunity. There are lots of sources of this inequality.
One example of government inequality is in sentencing of crimes. Also in arrests related to drug possession. Another example is tax breaks for the wealthy. And farm subsidies. Access to federal money for small businesses.
Sure, in the case I believe any inequality in sentencing and arrests should be eliminated. As should subsidies and non-consumption taxes, making tax breaks irrelevant/impossible. Seems like you have no such consistency.
Yeonmi Park's "While Time Remains" has a biting critique of Columbia University's "wokeness".[1] Park escaped from North Korea to China as a child. In China, she was an illegal alien, and if caught would be deported back to North Korea and executed, so she and her mother were kept as slaves. She managed to escape China and get to the US. So she knows about oppression.
She ended up as a student at Columbia University. "What a load of crap" she writes.
"The difference between a passing grade and a failing one lay in a refusal to criticize the usual targets (capitalism, Western civilization, white supremacy, systemic racism, oppression of minorities, colonialism, etc.) Worse than a bad grade was to be labelled by one's classmates as a 'SIX HIRB', a sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamaphobic, racist bigot."
On one hand I'm fan of standardized exams because they feel very very fair, are transparent and allow you to bootstrap yourself.
On the other hand I see the pros of taking people's traits into consideration because you know, it's not always that the top scorers are actually top people.
Unfortunately how to decide which traits are desirable? who decides that? etc etc.
And just because of that I'd default to first option - pure exams, because they're fair and transparent, rules are clear - just be the best.
But I do agree that in some cases there may be better ways to pick top people - just like during job interview.
When I studied physics it was almost “free admittance” (essentially a high school diploma with at least P-Level courses is what I think would be an equivalent in California).
Within the first semester everyone was weeded out who wouldn’t make it to the degree with theoretical physics and math courses.
It was pretty fair in retrospect. Everyone had their chance and a bad grade in English didn’t prevent anyone from pursuing physics. Since there was only an administrative fee of ~500€ for the semester it also didn’t ruin people’s finances
Whenever I see articles like this one, I imagine this is the kind of PR that US colleges would use to deflect conversational topics they don’t want happening. Get people talking about “how do we get into college?” (with the assumption that college is where we want to be) instead of “why is the US college system broken?”
Not saying this is that, but just a thought and I’d be curious to see if this is a trend that continues.
How is it a luxury belief? A luxury would imply that it's hard to obtain and rare/uncommon, yet this is a view that is widely held by a lot of people, and it's not like there is any barrier to believing in something, unlike having enough money to buy a luxury car. It's more like a trendy belief than a luxury one.
I worked during high school at a restaurant and later as a pizza delivery person.
In college I went to school at night and worked during the day.
I basically didn't get an education but paid for two pieces of paper that for me a great career... Not as good as a CMU grad, but pretty good.
The person OP is describing is me.
I don't think standardized testing is the answer. Nothing good happens by accident and using the SAT to fight a proxy war for accessibility of high quality higher education is not a good strategy.
I don't even know why people bother posting this stuff anymore.
We are living with mass encampments of the unhoused in our major cities full of the mentally handicap and physically addicted and our government and private sector has decided to let them rot.
45% of bankruptcies are caused by medical debt.
The rich have consolidated their power. The purse strings are closed. Nobody who matters gives a shit about the poor.
To quote George Carlin:
"But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.
It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.
Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want:
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking..."
Doesn't this go against what we know about SATs — which is that rich people do better simply because they have the time and money to do practice tests?
SATs don't measure much, they mostly measure how familiar you are with the structure of the test.
It seems to me that what's being debated here is a point of fact. Shouldn't the article be presenting directly applicable evidence rather than telling anecdotes about the Vietnam War?
In contrast, the bare minimum standardized testing in Poland ("matura") leaves you no chance whatsoever unless you've been keeping up in literature class for the past 3 years.
As a Canadian I never took anything like the SAT. I don’t quite get why it exists. Or why people are convinced it needs to exist. Most of the world does fine without it.
That being said, I support whatever helps empower the diminished classes and helps quash the undeserved power of those born into money. …And in that case, the SAT might make a lot of sense now that I think of it.
Even if your teenage years were a quagmire and you have no grades to show for it, a single test can still open you up to academic opportunities.
Yes, that's exactly the historical rationale for the adoption of the SAT. It gained popularity in the first half of the 20th century as an attempt to identify poor kids with academic potential, so they could get educational opportunities that would otherwise have been out of their reach. Harvard, for example, used to be populated almost entirely by people who had gone to expensive private schools -- and then in 1934 they started giving admission and scholarships to students from lower classes who scored well on standardized tests, as part of an effort to improve socioeconomic mobility.
Rich people feel less guilty ("black people do bad on tests", they say) and also don't have to pay for years of SAT tutoring so their average IQ kids overperform and qualify for prestigious colleges. Gifted underprivileged kids pay the price. Sounds about right.
Reading this is really weird for me. Worthwhile and eye-opening, but also baffling: I am literally the chair of the faculty committee at my small college that voted a couple of years ago to go test-optional (provisionally but with an eye toward making it permanent). I won't claim to be an great expert on the issues involved, beyond generally trying to keep up with the broad conversation about research outcomes: we're too small for any of us to specialize enough to get into the weeds of specific studies and methodologies outside of our fields (I'm in physics).
From all I've read in the past, though, standardized test outcomes are very strongly correlated with family wealth. The kids who have great SAT vocabularies are overwhelmingly the kids who grew up with parents with plenty of free time to read to them every day. High scoring kids are overwhelmingly the ones whose families could provide lots of educational support (either through direct help from available parents or through private tutoring). They're so very often the ones who spent weeks of their lives getting dedicated training in the otherwise-useless skill of "how to take a standardized test". And the correlation between SAT score and college success (by whatever metric) is IIRC quite low once you control for family background. So by and large, the faculty members that I know have come to see standardized testing as precisely a tool to give preference to kids from wealthy, privileged backgrounds.
Obviously the author of this article had a very different experience! And clearly there are kids out there who can use standardized tests to demonstrate amazing competence beyond what their grades show. (That's why we went "test optional" rather than "no tests allowed", for what it's worth.) And I'm not at all surprised that admissions essays correlate even more strongly with wealth than do SAT scores. (We don't rely entirely on essays, either.) Maybe we really did get it wrong, and the research we considered really was misleading, and universal testing would raise up more underprivileged students than it threw down. But I promise you, I absolutely 100% promise you, that no person in that room where we made the test-optional decision believed that the outcome of our decision would be fewer students with challenging backgrounds being admitted.
So is the claim here that the college decision makers adopting these policies are also dupes of "the chattering class"? (Aren't we supposedly a part of that class?) Or maybe it's just that I, personally, was the dupe of my faculty colleagues, who were conniving behind my back to get less competent students in their classes? I don't get it.
The only conclusion I can draw, in general, is that it is really hard to disentangle an individual student's intrinsic potential and preparedness from the influence of family wealth and resources. I agree with this author that there really are enormous systemic biases that encourage class segregation, and those biases are viciously wide-ranging and flexible and are embedded across all axes of achievement and opportunity. So I'm not particularly happy about the way that this essay very explicitly assumes bad faith on the part of those of us struggling to find a way to make things better.
[I'm posting this late enough that it'll probably never be seen, but given my connection to the subject I still feel compelled to chime in.]
I think people are missing the bigger picture, that's related directly to the SAT.
In the USA, public education funds are directly derived from the local tax base as a percentage of that revenue. If you live in a rich area, it means your family is also rich. The tax base, although it may be the rough same percentage, is much higher actual dollars than a small non-rich community.
I even see that locally in my nearby college town. There's definitely a "rich district". Homes go from $750k up to $5m. Their elementary has teachers and aides to cover students at 7:1, and flush with a wealthy technology budget. The other schools, or in particular, the "subsidized housing and trailer parks area's schools" have student coverage around 25:1, no teacher aides, and very limited tech budget.
This should be of little surprise given how our education system by default teaches the wealthy to be wealthy. And that starts as early as preschool and easily onwards through public school. And naturally, I didn't even touch upon private schools. And in my state, vouchers can be used from public schools on private and even religious schools. That too is an even higher rung on elitism.
Unless you're a genius from a poor family, you're likely going to stay in the "dumb and low paying" jobs for most of your lives.
Even the most expensive prep schools tend to do limited SAT test prep, if any.
Poor kids can technically access the same private test prep as rich kids, and whether they actually can or not, financially speaking, has nothing to do with the tax base and the school itself.
That being said, better schools do provide for better child development.
This can be compensated for, to a degree, by enhanced parental interaction with the child from an early age.
> This can be compensated for, to a degree, by enhanced parental interaction with the child from an early age.
Which, as this article points out, is exactly the kind of thing that wealthier parents are able to provide their kids and which less wealthy parents often cannot, even when they would like to.
We have to remember that Rob Henderson is a performer running his shtick. At first I really liked him, and in general agree with his assessments of things.
But he's just another guy that has to turn tricks with some new variant of "durr hurr liberal plan for X is elitist and a luxury belief."
It's a little personal with him, because right before the 2020 election he posted something pretentious like "In 2016 I bet and won a lot of money on the outcome of the election, and I bet even more this time" (Implying his non-elitist background gave him the clairvoyance that Trump would win. I asked him who he bet on this time. Then the results came in and Trump was clearly losing in 2020, and then he blocked me.
In the end, even if we agree with him, he's just another culture warrior that whose livelihood depends on feeding the angry masses outrage at whatever Team Blue/Team Red is doing.
I'm a fan of a level playing-field, and measuring, rather than judging, ability.
But lets face it the putative victim described by the author is actually up against the kids of quite privileged, or dedicated families, who will be hiring private tutors, sending their kids to evening cram schools, or doing the 'tiger-mom' thing.
Some flexibility might give a leg-up to talented kids who haven't had one before (although there is that danger that it could go woke).
> The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.”
> Applicants from the most affluent families excel at these games. A study at Stanford found that family income is more highly correlated with admissions essay content than with SAT scores. Applicants from well-to-do backgrounds are especially adept at crafting their essays in ways that please admissions committees.
If equity is so important, why not grant preferential treatment to all children coming from families that aren't upper-middle-class? Or ban legacy preferences at the very least? This is a simple and effective way of achieving the goals they claim to be championing. The author hit the nail on the head. Every other metric used for admissions is far more easily gamed by rich families. Hence why they are being preserved. Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack. All this talk about equity is the most convenient and cost-effective way to eliminate the one barrier that most vexes rich parents.