A Push to Make Harvard Free Also Questions the Role of Race in Admissions
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1) To know about Harvard and elite universities in general. Believe it or not, research shows that most qualified poor kids don't apply because they don't have any knowledge about the value of an elite education or that places like Harvard exist. Anecodotally, I know a couple of brilliant ones from poor backgrounds who went to their state universities simply because they had no idea there were other options - in fact, it was an imaginative stretch to go to college at all.
2) Family and community support for a college education, much less an expensive elite one far away. Sure, some super-teen can overcome this, but it's a major reason kids don't apply or drop out at high rates. My two friends were constantly asked, why would you want to go to college? Kids in these situations are in alien environments at college (that it seems perfectly normal to white middle-class kids should tell you exactly what environment it is) where they have few people who can relate to them (Edit: and an institution not built for their needs), then they go home and are asked why they are wasting their time and family's money. And as they absorb university life, they also become alienated from people at home who don't have those life experiences or opportunities.
3) Money: There is a very strong relationship between family money and college education.
4) An excellent high school education: Something else that correlates strongly with the family they come from.
5) Connections: It's not what you know, but who you know. Do you think all those kids in Harvard are there on merit? What about the legacies? The big donors' kids? The kids with recommendations from alums? Those aren't avenues available to most kids.
And all these things have a strong racial component. If Harvard can eliminate these factors then sure, why not eliminate affirmative action too?
This feels strangely familiar to me as a guy who moved from a tiny poor-ish European country to Silicon Valley in his late 20's. I know it's not the same, but holy shit, I never thought a random comment on a message board would peg me so well.
At least in my case most of my back-home environment understands the why, even if they do question the rationality of it.
But try to explain to the average Silicon Valley dweller that just ~6 years ago, a $5 purchase was a significant expense, and they have very little to relate to.
I didn't know any college used that argument. Certainly those kids should be judged on their own merits and not on stereotypes.
> I mean the preference for other races besides Asian when academic performance is held equal.
My point above, which I might not have explained well, is that racial preferences are unavoidable. Academic performance can't be held equal because the various applicants are competing on playing fields that can differ radically. (Also, as I point out at the end, Harvard admits students on many factors that aren't due to performance but due to the applicants' families' social networks and wealth.)
The best Harvard can do is manage the situation to make it as fair as possible, which may include balancing the discrimination against some races with preferences in their favor. I can understand arguments either way but I don't think it's realistic to eliminate that component withhout looking at its affect on the whole system.
Caltech manages to do this just fine. So does UC Berkeley. Harvard could stop racism if it wanted to.
hackuser's original post noted that there are race-based sorting effects outside of the admissions department. To that point, Caltech's admission policy, flaws or merits of it aside, is not a counterexample to hackuser's claim[2]. That's exactly the sort of system hackuser was talking about.
[1] http://jadeluckclub.com/caltech-meritocracy-from-the-america...
[2] Which I took to be, essentially, "racial discrimination in admissions is inevitable due to selection factors beyond the control of admissions policies."
EDIT: readability.
> But they have tied the notion to another equally provocative question: Does Harvard shortchange Asian-American applicants in admissions?
The elite colleges say anyone who gets in will be given affordable tuition, but they must have long known that their applicants come from specific socio-economic groups and therefore they are missing top applicants outside those groups. Why haven't they done much about it? (I can only guess.) Note that it must weaken their student body to miss so many top students.
Issue #1 has received a bunch of broader public attention recently (NY Times articles, etc.), so perhaps that has energized a response; I don't follow it closely enough to know.
I also know that solving #1 without solving #2 results only in a lot of dropouts. I happen to know someone at a good university that mentors a group of students from other backgrounds; the university has developed a detailed program to try to keep them in school.
Finally, I have read that Amherst, many years ago, decided that they would actually make an effort to admit a socio-economically (or maybe just economically; I don't know the details) diverse student body, with great success. That is true public service by an institution.
#2 empirically cannot be readily addressed by professionals. A number of schools have already adopted the approach you favor - a team of full-time professionals - and the problem persists.
I despise intellectual trends. If it was a good/bad idea before, that hasn't changed because the idea (or the entire subject) became un/fashionable. Privacy is one such issue that comes to mind.
I think we need federal laws enacted protecting privacy. I would like to see a universal Delete law. Meaning if I wanted everything from my IP address, or my name permently deleted from Facebook, Google, etc. servers they would be required to do so. It would also be a felony to sell, or even give away data.
Missing out on substantive discourse simply because of fear would make me sad.
Less sarcastically, at least here on hacker news you're as anonymous as you want to be. A future employer isn't going to find any comments you post if you remain as anonymous as you currently are.
If an employer rejects an applicant because of some comments they made 10 years ago, maybe one should think twice about working for that employer?
The problem is that "better-qualified" is not some absolute measure. I don't think any Ivy League-tier school would say that a formula of SAT+GPA is sufficient. There are several factors that aren't easily measured. For example:
1. Difficulty of high school course load.
2. Extra academic work. For example, if you've solved P=NP while having a 2.0 GPA -- would anyone care about your GPA?
3. Performance in academic-RELATED activities. If you win the IMO or the spelling bee or the Intel Science competition, etc...
4. Performance in non-academic activities. If you have a platinum album, does that matter? Or being a famous actor? Or creating a game changing app? Or becoming a top rated Go player?
4. Performance in athletics. Would being a Lebron James level talent matter? Winning an Olympic gold in gymnastics?
5. Having highly regarded morals, conviction, and courage. Would Malala get special treatment?
6. Socio-economics. All other things being equal, do we favor a student who has had no advantages over those who have had every economic advantage (best schools, tutors, etc..)?
7. Diversity of life experience (especially if exceptional). Would the child of a President have an advantage getting in? What about the experience of anyone that is fundamentally against the norm of most of the population of the incoming class. Maybe they navigated combat missions for the South Korean Navy.
I do think systemically excluding a certain race is a problem. But I don't think using an old notion of merit is much better.
The colleges were still considering the same criteria for admissions, but once race was removed, a significant increase in Asian American acceptances at the schools occurred. I think it's very hard to argue that Asian Americans failed on your aforementioned categories, or that there wasn't a systematic bias against them when considering these facts.
This may have occurred, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the metrics they used were the only reasonable metrics. I think Harvard would argue that their metrics always looked much different than state schools. And actually that probably cuts to the heart more than anything else:
What is the end goal of the pool of accepted students you bring in? Is it to reward the students for a job well done? Or is it to shape a society? Or is it something altogether different -- or a combination?
I think a lot of people view college admittance as a reward for a job well done. But maybe for top-tier colleges the goal is to create leaders who will shape the future. In which case diversity actually matters a fair bit. Can you get the societal diverse leaders that you want by accepting just Asian and White students? I honestly think the answer is probably no.
It's a matching problem as much or more as it is a ranking problem.
The Technion literally just admits people based on their exam scores, and nothing more. Seems to work for them. There are actually lots of universities in non-American countries that work this way.
You admit the first 1000 and have couple of places for people with 4-7 that were very close on the exam but were below the cut off line.
A proposition like this is really exciting to me! As a recent college grad (though admittedly one who's very lucky to not have loans, though my partner is screwed with them), I am particularly sensitive how how insane it is that college students are sold massive amounts of debt that many will take years to pay back. And a lot of new systems to help students pay them back are ineffective at best and disgusting at worst.
I am intrigued to see what the other motives are here. I doubt that there will be much change in how students pay back college debt, but we do need some sort of real change. I would be really excited to see a cultural shift away from profiteering from student debt.
I hate how the article phrases helping underrepresented minorities as hurting Asian Americans. The two things are not related. Universities will discriminate against us even without affirmative action. The Ivy Leagues invented "legacy" and "manliness" as admissions criteria. They will create new forms of discrimination. History repeats. Stop using us as an excuse. Stop driving a wedge between minorities.
Some links from wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausu...
They're related in the underlying implication that it's best to treat applicants as groups and not individuals.
But you could be fair with certain minorities and unfair with others. There is not a direct cause and effect relationship there.
But the people who equate the two don't actually care about Asian Americans. They are making a political argument.
Disclaimer: not a Harvard grad
I know I didn't apply to several schools merely out of exhaustion of trying to figure out how to not have to pay the application fee.
Nevertheless, if schools have any control over the "front-end" fees, they might ought to start by eliminating those. Knowing that one needs to send an email like that is also a barrier of a sort.
One, it is by definition discrimination by race. You are giving preferential treatment to people based on skin color.
Two, it creates distrust between students of different colors. If you know that some black students are accepted based on skin color rather than ability, then you'll start to suspect that the black students in your class didn't earn their ride to college, so to speak. In extreme cases, if you've been denied entry to Harvard, you may suspect that you were left out to leave room for a less-qualified but more "diverse" student.
These two issues combine to not only make affirmative action hypocritical, but also to make it actively harmful. Affirmative action doesn't "fix" racism, it encourages it.
And no I'm not saying that a name tells you the race. But sometimes it is an indication.
Not saying it's bulletproof; it's not. But it would help. And I can't think of a valid excuse for not doing it.
6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal ... I'm White'
...
The principal who hired him told him he was lucky to get the job because they hadn't been planning to take another student teacher. Then Allan's application showed up.
"They scanned through it ... and they saw someone named Jamaal who played basketball, listed Muhammad Ali among his heroes and inspirations, and thought, 'We could use some diversity here, so let's bring this guy on, I think he'd be good for some of our younger minority male students,'" he says.
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/06/404432206/six-words-my-name-is...
> I wonder if they still allow the names of admissions candidates to be revealed to the people who review the applications? It seems that hiding this would be a really basic step.
> And no I'm not saying that a name tells you the race. But sometimes it is an indication.
I guess a more relevant point is that if they think your race is relevant to admissions, then they're probably not thinking about removing names from the equation at all. I'd think that they'd happily admit to biases inherent in the process, but at the end of the day they'd argue that more information will allow them to make better decisions than less.
Better decisions for whom? Perhaps for their friends whose children are applying.
Sure they might argue that, in any case.
And it might even be true, if they were free from all bias, whether conscious or subconscious.
If they think race is relevant, they should just put that right out in the open as a requirement. Especially if they think that more information will allow them to make better decisions than less.
[1] http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html
[2] https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2007/12/11/harvard-takes-ano...
“There is a common misconception that endowments, including Harvard’s, can be accessed like bank accounts, used for anything at any time as long as funds are available,” Jeff Neal, a Harvard spokesman, said. “In reality, Harvard’s flexibility in spending from the endowment is limited by the fact that it must be maintained in perpetuity and that it is largely restricted by the explicit wishes of those who contributed the endowed funds.”
2. It's possible that the returns from the principal are also restricted.
2. That is why Harvard hasn't already done it, apparently.
http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/investment-management/performance...
Huh, but it doesn't specify whether this is inflation-adjusted.
Besides, they can't plan on using the maximum from the endowment every year, because the endowment sometimes grows less than usual, or even shrinks.
And similar top schools, especially private schools in and outside of the Ivy League. My first question would be what impact would this have on schools that actually depend on tuition to pay for things, those that aren't Harvard/Princeton/etc that don't have as huge endowments per student? Would the gap between the quality of the average student widen further between the very very top schools and the other top schools, further entrenching the status quo?
I meant A tier schools.
Barry Swartz, in my view wrote the definitive article about the mess elite university is in. Read it, "Do College Admissions by Lottery"~ http://nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/03/31/how-to-improve-t...
Still getting wound up about credentials? ~ http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html
This cheats both parties in any college admission as the best and brightest may not be able to meet on even ground and you slight those who are pulled up by placing in a situation where they will likely end up dead last in achievement because fellow students just do so much better. That last alone cannot be easily discounted simply for the psychological effects of placing low
If, say, Asians are overrepresented among electrical engineers and Blacks are underrepresented compared to the prevalence of those groups in the general population, it doesn't really affect those who will use the devices designed by those electrical engineers. My iPhone works the same for me regardless of whether or not the people who designed the circuits look like me, or in the same community as me, or have the same culture as me. We should still look at the demographics of electrical engineers, of course, to see if it is due to discrimination, but if it turns out that, say, Asian cultural values just tend to make Asians more likely than other groups to go into electrical engineering, that's not inherently a problem.
With doctors it is different. People want a doctor that understands their culture and community, because culture and community can have big influences on their health choices. Doctor demographics being too far from general population demographics is an inherent problem, even if it is not due to any kind of discrimination on medical school or admissions or in the pipeline leading to that.
This isn't a false claim.
The AEI source even acknowledges that Simpson's paradox prevents one from drawing conclusions (also please note the rhetorical quotation marks):
> The AAMC doesn’t provide acceptance data by individual medical school, so we can’t conclude that any of the four medical schools at public universities in Michigan (University of Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State and Oakland University) are practicing illegal “affirmative discrimination” or “racial profiling” in admissions
But quickly pivots, pretending like this doesn't matter:
> "Based on national data, is there any conclusion other than the obvious one – that US medical schools are granting special preferences for admissions on the basis of race for certain preferred minority groups (blacks and Hispanics) over other non-preferred minority groups (Asians) and whites"
Yes. Simpson's paradox. The data is consistent with schools being discriminatory in favor of whites if white people tend to apply only to selective schools, for example. This is why I don't bother with the playschool polemical bullshit that comes out of AEI. They ignore basic facts about statistical inference in order to push their views.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
P.S. Looks like I got roped into reading their blog post anyway. I guess my plan to save my time and patience failed.
That's probably one of the worst sentences that's ever been uttered in the english language, because it lets you dismiss an argument by assuming that because it involves math it must be manipulated and therefore bullshit.
To take it to an extreme, I don't bother verifying claims made by neonazis. AEI is obviously not that bad, but it's also not good enough for me to care.
What kind of amateur mistakes can AEI make? Well for one, I bet this analysis of the data falls victim to Simpson's paradox. Basic shit like that happens all the time in their analyses.
My sister and someone she went to high school with both went to the same college to pursue physical therapy. When it came time to apply for the physical therapy program after undergrad, my sister was denied while the other girl was accepted. There were only two differences on paper: 1. My sister's GPA was somewhere around 0.3-0.4 points higher; and 2. The other girl is a minority.
That seems like a rational requirement. Does anyone know what institutions like Harvard currently do with their annual earnings from endowments?
Additionally, charitable giving is incredibly consistent (around 2% of GDP). [0] If people didn't donate to Harvard, they would probably donate elsewhere.
I think you really have to stretch it to make this at the cost of taxpayers.
[0] https://philanthropy.com/article/The-Stubborn-2-Giving-Rate/...
It's their money, and ought to be theirs to do with as they please.
Those who would force them to spend it on something else are the people employing coercion. It's they who are in the wrong, morally.
You say the government employs coercion? You are correct; it does. For the greatest part, though, it employs it on those who, in the absence of the government, would themselves use coercion on those weaker than themselves. If you're not the strongest, you want a government to protect you from those stronger than yourself.
If we want a government at all, someone has to pay for it. (If you don't want a government at all, see the previous paragraph. Or see the horrible examples of places that, right now, don't have one.)
Do you want a government paid for entirely by voluntary contributions? Good luck with getting enough money that way. But the free rider problem not only starves the government of enough resources to function correctly, it also leads to citizens who are disengaged because they have no skin in the game.
Short of those unworkable extremes, what you probably really want is a much smaller government (like the one laid out in the Constitution, perhaps). It may not be funding government that bugs you; it may be funding that elephant of a government. If that's your position, I'm with you.
If there's going to be taxation, then, let it be fairly applied. Let there be much fewer loopholes, so that arguments about what the government should fund can be out in the open, in the budget process, rather than arguments about the mind-numbingly complex details of the tax code.
Compulsory taxation, yes.
I think that should be enough to tell you that your view is unlikely to be correct.
I think the word you're looking for is 'unpopular' ;)
It seems we're largely agreed on the proper purpose of Government - to protect citizens from each other, that is, to protect their rights. But don't you see it as wrong for the Government to violate those very rights in order to fund itself?
Do you want a government paid for entirely by voluntary contributions? Good luck with getting enough money that way.
Actually, funding a Government isn't that expensive. If you pare Government back to core functions, you don't need much money. In New Zealand, we (meaning the Libertarianz) estimated it at around $2,500 / working adult / year. That (back at the turn of the 21st century) would get you courts, police, Parliament, defense, embassies and the glue to run it all.
Then you need a way of raising the money. Probably, most working people can afford $2,500 per year to keep civilisation running, especially if they're not paying any other taxes. Maybe a poll tax? Seems reasonable that those paying also do the voting. Could simply solicit donations, or maybe run a lottery.
But no: you couldn't run a socialist country that way. Which is sort of the point :)
Sure. But how many of those who can afford it will send it in voluntarily? I seem to be more cynical than you; my answer is "not enough".
Proposed system: your parents pay taxes that cover less than the college cost (not everyone has kids that go to college). You go to college. Bank gets nothing. After college, your pay more tax than in current system, but you have no student debt, so you total expenses are significantly lower.
Which system do you think is better (assuming you're not a bank)?
That way user pays, but user doesn't get gouged.
It works well enough here in New Zealand. Your student loan is interest free here, unless you go overseas for more than 6 months.
Why not set up a non-profit and solicit donors, sponsors, etc.? That way you can have all the benefits of interest-free student loans, without the coercion.
Also, if I may ask, how much of a typical student loan goes to tuition fees? I think interest free student loans to pay for the cost of living while in college is a good system.
There are minimum repayments, which are skimmed from your paycheck.
About $7000 a year goes to tuition, and about the same on living costs. The government also has a means-tested student allowance, which is based on your parents income, which I'm not eligible for, but replaces the living costs loan (which is a bit bullshit).
So the more people you can educate, the more valuable each educated person is. This is because innovation more commonly occurs with collaboration than without.
The U.S. has already reaped significant windfalls from all the excellent foreign students attending its universities. Create an environment with a high density of trained thinkers, and innovations result. And there may be no limit to the benefits. If we (as a species) could educate everybody up to the limit of their intelligence and imagination, rather than to the depth of their pockets, even a professional futurist would be hard pressed to predict the consequences.
This is one situation where it is very clear how a cartel enforcer can provide an overall benefit to the cartel by enforcing a certain mode of behavior.
But the problem with levying taxes for public schooling is that there is much more to education than just the amount of money you spend on schools.
It's highly dependent on the kind of education a person receives. For example, we will get much more productivity growth from a typical engineering graduate than philosophy graduate (though we still need some philosophy graduates).
That, and the fact that you're funding a supposedly benevolent institution by threatening people with jail or death should they choose not to pay for it.
It is a side effect of electing politicians that were never taught to consider the potential consequences of their own actions from the perspective of someone else who may be affected by them. To them, taxes magically appear from happy munchkins who sing about how great it is to pool their resources for the common good, and the only worry is about how to get the politicians from the evil other party to go along with spending the money to do something useful and good this time.
Since public schools rarely teach that there is no such thing as a free lunch, those who are fully schooled are still incompletely educated. I recall being taught in high school that Keynesian macroeconomics were superior to classical macroeconomics, and left without an inkling that Chicago or Austrian macroeconomics even existed.
Who would have thought that a government-funded school might teach me that deficit spending is good for the economy? I wonder if that teacher was paid out of the pocket of someone who didn't want higher taxes, or if he was paid out of the state's credit account?
But that's beside the point. In the transition from a worker-based to a robot-based economy, unskilled labor no longer has any role. Everyone has to, at minimum, be able to design, build, program, repair, or maintain the robots. If you can't train everyone up to the minimum requirements for the jobs that will exist, or remove their absolute need to have a job, you are abandoning them to lives of crime or rent-seeking. Whether you choose to spend the money on education, basic income, or hordes of useless middlemen or criminals, you just can't redesign an economy such that the lifeblood never manages to flow through any of the capillaries. Poor people not only have to eat, but they also have to feel like their lives have meaning.
- solicit money from rich donors (as seems to be the case here)
- adopt policies to drive down the cost of quality education, instead of making it more expensive as has been the case for the past many years
- establish charitable scholarships, funded by donations, sponsorships, etc.
- establish non-profit mutual societies to lend money to students at cost price
There are many options that don't involve holding a gun to people to demand they pay for the education of others.
They always frame it in terms of 'fairness', but I see another pattern. Does anyone really believe they are motivated by fairness? There are people facing far more unfairness in the world and in the U.S. than wealthy white and Asian college applicants - I don't see these groups paying much attention to them.
Perhaps what outrages people about Trump is that he says what many others in his party say, but doesn't use the dog-whistle[1] coded bulls*t words to cover it up.