The correlation between standardized test scores, GPA, high school graduation rate and six-year college graduation rate are bound intimately to income and class.
So what? Why do you believe that merit is not correlated with income and class?
Suppose, hypothetically, that some reference classes are simply intrinsically better than others at math and reading. Wouldn't any meritocratic system result in rewards being correlated with membership in the aforementioned reference class?
You are correct that using "holistic" admissions rather than standardized tests is likely to reduce meritocracy. That's the whole point. Meritocracy gets you too many of those geeky Asians, and it would be really bad if colleges were full of Asians.
[edit: My last sentence is indeed sarcastic. I favor meritocracy, not ethnic corporatism.]
>> So what? Why do you believe that merit is not correlated with income and class?
I went to inner city schools. You have no idea how poor they are. Even the smartest kids who really wanted to learn had no chance.
Examples:
-> My Calculus teacher taught use that you can use advanced polynomials to beat craps.
-> My economics teacher didn't teach us anything all year. I'm not exaggerating here. We literally never opened our books in class and I don't think we had more than 4 quizzes the entire time.
-> My Spanish teacher was about the same, except he did give one lesson per month, but we mostly chatted in class. If you were already Hispanic, you got an A. If you weren't, you got a C. No point trying beyond that.
-> Physics was my first class of the day and I slept through it every time and it was generally the same zoo as all the other classes. I had the highest score in the class.
-> The people with the highest grades in our biology class were the people who didn't show up but once a month and refused to touch a knife. Those of us who sat in class, dissected the pigs, and really tried to learn the material generally got D's.
-> "Computer class" was 4 years of learning how to type.
-> Homework was virtually non-existent.
-> I can assure you that merit had nothing at all to do with the grades I received.
I can't possibly enumerate how bad the education was in one post. You had two options: go to a community college or go to the state college. Anything else would have caused the guidance counselors look at you in shame and they would tell you things like "No one in this district went to that kind of college, so it's no point applying."
As you can gather, I was in all of the so-called advanced classes. I can only imagine what the "normal" classes were like.
I went to inner city schools. You have no idea how poor they are. Even the smartest kids who really wanted to learn had no chance.
Some odd summers ago I went across Chicago Public Schools to document building lighting for upgrades to more efficient lamps, since the current lamps the building "engineers" were using stopped being manufactured and supply was starting to run out.
Some of the shit I've seen there puts third world countries to shame. One day my photography partner couldn't make it so I brought my mother along to fill her spot. After we finished a particularly bad school she began crying because it reminded her of her own primary schooling in communist Ukraine some ~50 years ago. It was incomprehensible and heartbreaking to her that such a great country like America could have such terrible education standards. The difference between rich and poor schools is night and day. When you don't have central heating, when half of the bathroom facilities don't work, and when you don't even have enough money to buy chalk, there's absolutely no way you could even possibly comprehend to compete with the likes of Walter Payton.
I'm well aware of how bad many US schools are. But that is besides the point.
If the people coming out of that high school don't know math, economics, spanish or physics, then they have less academic merit than students from a better school who do. It might be unfair that some people get a sucky school/parents/genes, but that doesn't contradict meritocracy.
I understand your point about merit being correlated with income and class. It is obviously true that wealthy, upper-class high school seniors will have higher test scores, more impressive accomplishments, and (frankly) superior academic abilities when compared with their lower-class counterparts. But you must know that this is attributable to differences in upbringing and opportunities, with varying levels of immediate relevancy (e.g. SAT tutoring, better teachers, parents who introduce intellectual discourse into the home). This means that any supposedly "pure" meritocracy, which does not account for those differences of opportunity, is going to be heavily biased towards those who were born into privilege. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle of class immobility that, I think, most people find undesirable. If you don't agree with the idea that two children with equal natural talents should, in a perfect world, have equal opportunities to pursue those talents, then I'd love to hear your version of meritocracy.
When you say "holistic" admissions, I'm not sure whether you mean holistic in the sense that colleges use it (i.e. taking evidence of talent outside of grades and test scores into account) or as a reference to programs which take race or class into account. Either way, you present standardized tests as the more meritocratic approach, which is silly. A perfect SAT score means a student is great at basic math, reading, and writing in an extremely specific context. That can be an extremely useful foundation, but do you honestly think that indicates this student is the "best?" That someone with lower scores who has published a bestselling book or won an international science prize or started a great humanitarian effort is on a lower tier in the meritocracy? Of course, all of these things are biased even more heavily towards rich students, but that's why class and background must also be taken into account.
I suspect I may have misunderstood parts of what you were saying, so please do clarify (if you can make it through my little word dump :P).
Meritocracy is generally not about "natural talent", it is about accomplishment. It may be the case that $REFERENCE_CLASS_1 performs poorly because they parent their children badly.This doesn't mean that the final process doesn't measure merit, it just means that because of bad parenting or whatever, $REFERENCE_CLASS_1 has less merit than $REFERENCE_CLASS_2.
To take two extreme reference classes, children deprived of oxygen at birth have less merit than children given sufficient oxygen. The result of oxygen deprivation is unfair and sad, but that doesn't mean the brain-damaged child strangled by his umbilical cord is more meritorious than the normal child.
Let me be clear about "holistic" admissions. This is usually just a code word that means "we'd love to just use quotas to let in enough non-asian minorities and keep out those jerky asians, but we can't, so we'll do holistic admissions instead." This is what I'm referring to when I use the term.
freedom and equality are not opposed. Meritocracy can accomodate both.
To follow your example, if the brain-damaged child strangled by his umbilical cord achieve just as much as the normal child, he has more merit.
That's the 2nd principle of political liberalism: "Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society."
In that case, let both brain damaged and normal children compete.
But I agree with your case, most admissions system are poorly disguised racism. Life sucks sometimes.
> if the brain-damaged child strangled by his umbilical cord achieve just as much as the normal child, he has more merit.
I think you need to start defining what you mean by "achievement" and "merit," because "equal achievement" and "greater merit" are not the same things from my perspective. If a brain-damaged child achieves just as much a normal child, they have equal merit, from my perspective.
Again, I think a lot of people are conflating meritocracy with social justice. I think this attitude stems from the fact that people think meritocracy is "good," and that social justice is also "good," so meritocracy must necessarily be socially just, when that is not the case. Meritocracy alone is neither inherently socially unjust or inherently socially just.
It's worth noting that 'merit' in the 'test scores' approach just means scored X on test Y and/or Z on test W. So if (for example) someone gets low SAT scores, but cures cancer, they don't get admitted, because 'cures cancer' isn't part of the admissions criteria.
Setting aside the fact that in reality the person who cures cancer will get admitted because colleges take into account academic honors and achievements, and setting aside the fact that there is a high correlation between test score and likelihood of discovering a cure for cancer, the point you are making is one of "what constitutes merit," which is entirely tangential to my original point (which in no way equated merit to solely test scores).
Actually "holistic" admissions means "we're not going to be irrationally obsessed with SAT scores".
Basically if SAT is your sole criterion then you become Caltech. Caltech is a great school but there are other human phenotypes that would like to go to college and other universities to accommodate them.
Actually "holistic" admissions means "we're not going to be irrationally obsessed with SAT scores".
What a coincidence - when the supreme court said point-based race discrimination was illegal but discrimination in holistic systems was legal, colleges immediately switched to holistic admissions.
Yeah dude all schools across the board immediately switched to continue to keep down the asian man. The court decision you are alluding to simply outlawed giving points to applicants for being of a certain race. The FEW schools using these systems did so as a way of countering latent effects of slavery. After the ruling they stopped doing so. What's your point?
It's bound to divorce rate, that differs greatly between socioeconomic circles and ethnicities. End of the day it's tied up to the time parents dedicate to their children's education, and for divorced or never married single parents on a single income this is a tough proposition.
So what? Why do you believe that merit is not correlated with income and class?
Suppose, hypothetically, that some reference classes are simply intrinsically better than others at math and reading. Wouldn't any meritocratic system result in rewards being correlated with membership in the aforementioned reference class?
You are correct that using "holistic" admissions rather than standardized tests is likely to reduce meritocracy. That's the whole point. Meritocracy gets you too many of those geeky Asians, and it would be really bad if colleges were full of Asians.
[edit: My last sentence is indeed sarcastic. I favor meritocracy, not ethnic corporatism.]