The college admissions scam | Hacker News Reader

The college admissions scam

boston.com

40 pointsilamont48 comments

In every society, the wealthy have advantages over those who are less well off, and the shock to me would be to discover that such advantages did not extend to a higher rate of admission to the best schools. In my thinking, to call this a "scam" says more about the author than it does about the admissions process he is questioning.

I think a lot is revealed here in the way the author handles the SAT. This test is still widely used as a major part of admissions. The author cites academic studies indicating a strong correlation between high test scores and high family income. So far, so good. It is the conclusion he draws from this that is suspect, and that is to suggest that the test simply serves as a false cover for institutions claiming to admit based solely on merit while systematically favoring the wealthy in reality - hence the alleged scam.

This to me is logically flawed along post hoc, ergo propter hoc lines. If the SAT truly does not test for merit, that is fine - abolish it. If, however, it does indeed test for merit and rich kids tend to do better at it, this means only that such kids tend on average to be better prepared academically at this stage in life than are poorer kids. But isn't that what a system based on merit is supposed to determine? Why then call it a scam?

Apart from the SAT, it may be that the author's other evidence in support of his contention is enough to support his thesis. When I hear "scam," however, I expect something pretty strong to support it and when I see the sort of analysis that appears here with respect to the SAT, I tend to think that the author himself is prejudiced on this issue (i.e., that he himself prefers to see a leveling quite apart from merit and is using a hypocrisy argument merely as an attack tool), leading me to regard the rest of what he says with a healthy measure of skepticism.

I think his fundamental definition of merit is how well two students would perform given equal academic preparation.

So knowing calculus doesn't make you smarter than someone who doesn't because that other person may have never had the opportuniy to learn it.

Yes, I would agree. He states that the SAT score serves as a "proxy" for the resources such students have had available to them in high school and, one would infer, is therefore rigged against middle class and poor students who had lesser quality resources at their disposal.

The unstated premise, though, is that elite academic institutions have a social obligation to act affirmatively to equalize outcomes in society by finding alternative ways to qualify students for admission besides the academic capabilities such students demonstrate at the time of applying. Since they have no way of knowing who has what innate merit that may not yet be reflected in academic test scores or historic grades, this ipso facto leads to a system where they have to apply quotas or arbitrary weighting adjustments (e.g., x% upward adjustment in GPA to account for having come from a poor school district) to achieve the equalization sought. Such adjustments will then have the effect of excluding some applicants with higher current performance scores in favor of others with what administrators deem greater unrealized merit, which seems a fairly arbitrary outcome. Whether this would lead to inclusion of more students based on true merit would seem to me to be a dubious proposition but it would decidedly put the schools in the business of trying to iron out social inequalities through admissions standards tied to something other than measurable academic criteria. This is the logical outcome of divorcing the idea of merit from any objective means of measuring it.

"Nor does diversity extend to racial composition. Of course every college boasts about its efforts to enroll a more racially diverse student body. But here are the facts: A New York Times article in 2004 revealed that Harvard’s incoming freshman class was 9 percent black, but between one-half and two-thirds of those black students were actually West Indian or African immigrants or the children of immigrants, and many others were biracial. In short, they weren’t African-American."

The racial spoils system is mindbogglingly perverse and unjust, and nowhere is this more apparent than the squabbling among people to preserve their access to the crumbs they can take from it. Study hard in high school, pah, that's for Asians -- we've got to keep those Johnny Come Lately Africans from taking our spots!

In the U.S., we've effectively created segregated public university systems that preserve and extend the status quo even as HBCUs have trouble maintaining enrollments. In every major metropolitan area, there's at least one or two public four-year colleges that are predominantly African-American. Under the cover of "extending access", we've re-created separate but equal in our higher education system: a place where mandatory busing won't solve our issues.

HBCU = historically black college or university

What I don't understand is that in my state, so many blacks choose to go to HBCUs, even when (it seems) they could go to a better non-HBCU school.

Probably because they want to be around other black people.

Which "we" is responsible? The individual schools? Parents? Students? And can you describe how it's a problem that some schools are racially homogenous? Given the same academic standards, a school with low minority enrollment will try harder to get a minority student than a school with high minority enrollment.

So you're sort of positing this Maxwell's Demon of Segregation: even though public policy and public statements all draw minority students (of a given level of ability) into situations with fewer minorities (by, e.g., lowering admissions standards, offering them scholarships), minorities still end up segregating. Some collective "we" is responsible (presumably in a way that requires this "we" to pay a little money to somebody else's "us"). But there are many missing pieces to the puzzle.

The author spends a lot of effort ignoring the simple explanation that wealthy families can spend more money on things that make a world of difference in educational opportunities later on, such as books in the home and parents who know how to read.

The educational gap between poor and wealthy students is certainly something worth trying to remedy, but colleges wanting the best students is no more a conspiracy to keep the poor powerless than the demand for money is a conspiracy to keep them poor.

As an SAT tutor I can remark that wealthy families have a real advantage in the process in being able to pay the high fees for SAT training. I think the best way to eliminate such an advantage would be to ask students to report what sort of tutoring or classes they got.

Agreed; I've been doing pro bono SAT teaching in inner city schools since 2000, but nothing can replace one-on-one SAT tutoring, which I've never seen a grant for.

How does one get into this? Are you a teacher, or are schools also looking for professionals in other fields to help out?

A bunch of my friends from college are doing or have done this. For pro bono stuff, I believe you just find an SAT tutoring place you'd like to help out and volunteer. It's pretty manpower and time intensive, so they're always looking for qualified people. You definitely don't have to be a teacher. I believe they ask for your own SAT scores though, and only take people that scored significantly above what would be expected from the people you're trying to tutor. My friends are mostly in the 1500+ range, and a bunch have perfect 1600s, so they're pretty hot commodities on the market.

I started teaching for Kaplan back in 2000, and pretty much used that as my credential.

(I've since left Kaplan to work on Red Ivy Prep, my side project that aims to find repeatable TODOs based on learning styles. Thankfully, I have a sister getting a PhD in learning and memory research who's helping me out with the theory. I'm trying to do a free all-day drop-in workshop for students here in Boston on MLK day, but it's a lot harder without that credential anymore.)

Thank you both for following up. I like this, because its something actionable that I can do to have an impact on an unfair system.

I am having trouble locating SAT test prep centers in Raleigh, NC who provide free training (via Google). I will try to contact the school system directly this week.

"My friends are mostly in the 1500+ range, and a bunch have perfect 1600s, so they're pretty hot commodities on the market."

I think that is mostly true for people who are younger and have less other experience. If you are trying to tutor in HS or College you will need exceptional scores. However, if you have graduated with a degree in Math, English, or Education you can likely parlay that into tutoring, certainly pro-bono, they can use all the qualified people who are willing to help

I think the author suggests that merit alone should be a determining factor, so that quantative knowledge, which can vary depending on education level, does not determine admissions.

People who feel benefitted by the elite college system will obviously be a proponent of it. They will then keep perpetuating the system which produces similar people. It's not a conscious conspiracy, but effectively one.

The legacy/athlete spots are the price of free tuition for middle-class students. The money has to come from somewhere, and if it's not coming from tuition fees, it has to come from wealthy alums. Those wealthy alums are more likely to donate if a.) their kids get in and b.) their school keeps winning.

Elite colleges have largely opted for a system where they set aside a portion of slots to keep the money flowing, and then use that money to make sure that anyone else who can get into the remaining slots will be able to come, and nobody will be turned away because they can't afford it. I find this system a little unsettling, since it's hard to pretend this is fair. But as someone who attended an elite college and was only able to do so because they paid for 2/3 of my tuition, I'm not really in a position to complain. It seems better than a system where everybody has an equal shot of getting in, but anyone making less than $100K/year doesn't have a prayer of being able to afford it.

College is just a big inefficient n-player prisoner's dilemma. Defection is getting a degree. Cooperating is not getting a degree. As soon as one person defects, everybody defects and are worse off than if nobody defected. (If everybody has a degree you have no competitive advantage in the job market, and you are ~100K poorer; thus everybody is worse off than if nobody had purhcased a degree). The system merely serves as a proxy for IQ tests which are generally illegal in hiring.

College is not just for signaling. The world is much richer in people competent in Electrical Engineering as a result, something which very few would be competent in if everyone cooperated in not getting a degree.

You are conflating vocational training with degree acquisition, which sometimes overlap, but usually do not.

If the only thing you get out of college is a piece of paper saying you graduated then you did something very wrong.

If after four years in the work force, you only learned what you would have gotten from a BA program, you're probably digging ditches.

Really? Where in the work force do you get to learn about GIS software, play with expensive photography equipment, sit with scientists, philosophers, historians, literary critics, etc., to discuss their fields, not to mention chatting over dinner with all kinds of diverse 18–22 year-olds who in a decade or two will be actors, politicians, artists, diplomats, company founders, and so on? What job do you have whose members are all involved in myriad dance troupes and music groups constantly putting on $5 shows and concerts? What job dumps a stream of free co-worker–written literary magazines, political and scientific reviews, and a daily newspaper in your door box?

I don’t know any work place as diverse as the most boring monoculture of an engineering college.

People don't stop being interesting when they get their diplomas. At my last job, one of my coworkers (in his mid 20's) already held local office part-time; another fronted a mildly successful band. The writing quality at school newspapers tends to be really bad, unless you're at a good school (stop by a state university campus and pick up a copy some time).

I agree that not all jobs have interesting people. But the people who are interesting in school tend to stay interesting. In fact, they're more fun to deal with once their goal changes from "Continue getting financial aid / parental aid" to "Do something that pays well."

Plorkyeran claimed that college is about more than a diploma, which you responded to by saying that you learn things on the job that you wouldn’t learn in college. My retort was that colleges are incredibly diverse, and enable many conversations and experiences that simply wouldn’t all happen in any other single place, and the best you can do is to tell me that people are still interesting after they graduate?

I’m sorry, but the constitutional law scholar, the electrical engineer, the chamber singer, the neurobiology review editor, the congressional staffer, the south asian dancer, the ancient babylonian historian, the photographer, and the basketball player aren’t going to all be sitting at lunch talking about the lecture they just listened to about Kant with their venerable philosophy professor in any job I’ve ever heard of.

Yes, there are interesting people everywhere (in the supermarket, for instance, or at a rock concert or hiking through a national park). That doesn’t mean that the college experience can be easily replaced anywhere else I can think of. Which is not to suggest that college is essential, but only that it has value beyond certification or specific curricula.

> ... they're more fun to deal with once their goal changes from "Continue getting financial aid / parental aid" to "Do something that pays well."

Both of those sound like awfully boring goals. I’d be pretty disappointed in any friend of mine whose chief ambition in life was to make lots of money.

But you can't assume college is the most efficient for obtaining other things. It is however guaranteed to give you a degree.

What are you talking about? "It" is hardly guaranteed to give you a degree.

And honestly, efficiency is overrated. For one thing, it assumes that you know what to optimize for. For another, there are all sorts of fools on the Internet who seem content to scrap an "inefficient" system that does something, for nothing that does nothing.

Strong on anecdotes. Weaker on verifiable data. It fits the mood of angst of parents of young people who are applying to college this year. (I am a parent of a current applicant, but I'm trying not to be so anxious.)

Can you provide two clear objective assertions the article made that it didn't support with adequate evidence?

(I found the tone hyperbolic but the analysis compelling).

"as many as one-third of admissions, he writes, are flagged for special treatment at the elite universities"

Yale keeps records on its Web site that show that legacy students have made up between 13 and 16 percent of incoming classes in the last 10 years. Most schools don't make this available, so where did the data come from? The use of the qualifier "as many as" means there has to be one university, but which one is it?

"Of course every college boasts about its efforts to enroll a more racially diverse student body. But here are the facts: A New York Times article in 2004 revealed that Harvard’s incoming freshman class was 9 percent black, but between one-half and two-thirds of those black students were actually West Indian or African immigrants or the children of immigrants, and many others were biracial."

Without the information of how many actually applied, how many were on the appropriate level to apply and how many wanted to go to any college, this part seems meaningless. Is it still wrong if it was also 9% that applied in the first place? Maybe the number was higher, maybe lower - we have no context to judge.

I see viraptor has provided one of the two examples that readily come to mind. Harvard in 2004 may not generalize to most colleges today, and black people who are biracial is largely irrelevant, because a person with one white parent and one black parent has always been "black" for purposes of enforcing Black Codes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_%28United_States%29

and other mechanisms of legally supported prejudice against black people.

"A counselor told me when my daughters were applying for college admission that the first thing I had to do was withdraw my application for financial aid. When I said that colleges professed to be 'need blind,' she laughed."

Not only is that an anecdote, that is an anecdote from a biased source. Professional college admission counselors use parental anxiety on the part of wealthier parents to generate their business. They are never going to refer to information that might suggest that large categories of applicants don't need their services.

There may indeed be some evidence that colleges favor wealthier rather than poorer students,

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0621.pdf

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg-affacti...

http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveragi...

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510012

http://www.equaleducation.org/commentary.asp?opedid=1240

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html

http://www.ihep.org/publications/publications-detail.cfm?id=...

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11...

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hkBGMsvJKR...

and I for one would like to know what the most recent and most carefully gathered data show on this issue, but I wouldn't take a professional college admission counselor as a competent, objective source on such an issue, and no journalist should either.

Your comment upvoted because you asked me to provide evidence for my statement in the grandparent comment.

I found this argument structure pretty ridiculous, along the lines of: correlation is not always causality, but let's just pretend it is and not report on any changes in demographic qualities of student populations.

"When the SAT was instituted in the 1920s it was done precisely in the name of changing the admissions process to a more egalitarian one....In truth, the SAT, which is thankfully being phased out at many schools, has had the opposite effect....While correlation isn’t always causality, economics professor Jesse Rothstein of Berkeley has called it a proxy for other demographic components and for high school resources."

Overall, the biggest problems with this nonsense article are the common presumption that college admissions are supposed to correct for all inequality, conflating equal opportunity with equal ability, and a stated desire for a meritocracy while simultaneously rejecting any approaches to measuring merit that don't come up with an answer that equally represents every way he's decided to slice up the population demographically.

Maybe what we really need is more high school admission tests, so we can keep pushing the problem identification further back.

Many of the points in the article ring true for me, but I feel compelled to offer an alternate partial explanation for some of the trends.

Family income correlates with intelligence and determination. Intelligence seems to be heritable, and determination may be; it's certainly passed along through upbringing if not genetics. Intelligence and determination also correlate well with high school performance, SAT scores and to some degree, athletics.

There may well be a conspiracy here, but I think we'd see the same trend to a lesser degree without it.

Ahem, Paris Hilton.

Ignoring personal taste, she is wildly successful/famous and makes oodles of money from products just having her name on it.

Paris is rich because she's rich, and famous because she's famous. To me, she's a symbol of much that's wrong with the US today. None of this says that she's particularly intelligent or savvy.

Which brings us full circle back to the article:

"Golden’s focus was on legacy admissions, which are essentially affirmative action for the rich and which provide huge advantages for applicants..."

Fortunately for this community, prestigious degrees seem to be declining in importance. Anyone can found a startup, investors can look at traction and track record, etc. Even big software firms that hire thousands of people a year spend a lot of money and effort to recruit from a broad range of schools.

The last very obvious pocket of degree elitism where CS / engineering grads might go seems to be Wall Street and management consulting (for very rational reasons).

"But while these are overt ways to provide advantages for the wealthy, there are far more insidious and subtle methods of skewing the admissions process. Take early admissions. Early admissions account for 35 percent of the incoming class at Duke this year, 20 percent at Brown, 50 percent at Yale and 40 percent at Stanford."

While he makes a good point, the author doesn't note that both Harvard and Princeton recently (~2006) ended their early applications programs completely, to much fanfare. We can hope that other schools will follow their lead soon.

Student test scores also strongly correlate with parent test scores, even more so than inter-generational earnings correlates. In the paper "Do Smart Parents Raise Smart Children?", Anger and Heineck assert that while a 10% increase in parents’ income raises children’s income by 2%, a 10% increase in parents’ test scores raises children’s test scores by 4.5%. Perhaps the real problem is that mediocre parents raise mediocre children, and no amount of test retooling is going to change that fact. In their book Herrnstein and Murray establish a strong correlation between income and intelligence. The chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Author.27s_follo... is particularly telling.

It stands to reason that if intelligent people are very likely to earn high incomes, and are also very likely to have intelligent children, that intelligent children are likely to have parents with high incomes. Retooling higher education so that it is as fair and ineffective as primary and secondary public education doesn't seem like a particularly good idea.

One thing I can say is that medical school admissions, while incredibly tough and competitive, is far more egalitarian than undergrad admissions. Med schools want the best students, period. They don't really care where you came from or who your parents were, but that you took advantage of all the opportunities availed to you in your college, and perhaps made some of your own.

This is incorrect, at least at "named" med schools. Family background, ethnic background, collegiate pedigree, etc, are still of tremendous importance for admission, and can overcome GPA and MCAT.

I knew a black premed and a middle-eastern premed.

Both of them came from privileged families, yet had below par scores and grades, and both managed to get into Harvard med.

This is false. Whites/asians accepted by medical school have average GPAs of 3.7 (3.6 in the sciences) vs 3.4 for blacks (3.3 in the sciences). The average white/asian MCAT is about 10 (9.9 asian, 10.2 white), while the average for blacks is 8.3.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080801022539/http://www.aamc.or...

All I can say is that whatever the medical school admissions system (in the US) is trying to do, the result is producing premeds, and that is a side effect that is very hard to swallow :) The worst part is that, once those premeds get to med school, they just become "pre-residents", which may even be worse...

I was talking to an MD/PhD friend of mine recently and we were talking about medical students and why medical school seemed to be so different from grad school. One of the conclusions we came up with was that in med school the professors and attending docs have no investment in the students, unlike profs who rely on students to do their research. This lack of dependence seems to lead to an incredible amount of politics and what is essentially ass kissing (with the goal of getting recommendation letters), something I never really saw from students when I was in (physics) grad school. Research students rely on performance.

I'd say you can probably extend your comment about merit based admissions to science and engineering (and probably other types of grad school). In physics you generally don't even interview. They just look at your scores, grades, publications, letters, etc., then make an offer. After that they will invite you for a visit. They don't care about things like extra curricular activities or where you grew up. They would like more minorities/women, though.

Most Early Admissions programs are no longer binding. Students from families earning less than 100K no longer have to pay tuition at several top schools. Every school I was accepted to pretty much offered the same financial aid, which was inline with what FAFSA said my family should contribute. I have never heard of anybody admitted to a top school having to turn it down due to finances. There is plenty of aid (grants that you don't have to repay) for anybody who is not rich.

As for SAT tutoring, well for kids applying to top schools this will probably improve your M+V less than 100 points. If it's any more than that, you probably aren't top school material.

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