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Comment by EliRivers | Hacker News Reader

Serious question; on what basis is "how well they will do at college" the right metric to use for selecting who to accept?

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Flip it around; how is it good to accept someone to college who does not have a good chance of doing well? How good is it to accept their money, probably put them in debt (even if not the catastrophic $100,000+ debt, even $20,000 debt can be quite a lot for a young person, and it's hard to get out of 4 years without at least that much), and claim very significant portions of some of the most important years of their life [1] if you already have good reason to believe they are unlikely to do well? (And remember we're judging lots of people so statistical bases are all we can use.)

It may not be the only criterion of use, but "do we have good reason to believe they will succeed in college?" is at the very least a critical bar that ought to be passed. It's can be the difference between college as the empowering, education experience it's supposed to be, and college as the meat-grinder wealth-extraction tool it can be when you feed in students who shouldn't be there.

[1]: Not necessarily "best", but being "earliest" in a world of compounding interest makes them quite valuable in their own way.

It's also true that the better less-selective (or non-selective) colleges provide more help than very selective colleges. I went to community college for a year and then went to a selective private college. The community college had far more help sessions, tutors, and study aids available. There was even a program at the community college that specifically sought out first-generation students to make sure they were getting extra support.

An excellent question.

In practice, that's not who we select. One college in the Midwest I know of selected 1) kids related to alumni, 2) people of a certain religion, 3) people who would add to the sports and music programs, 4) kids of color with good grades and high SAT scores, and last 5) people who didn't fit the above, especially from California, Texas, or Florida, who could pay full tuition. A major goal at some small colleges is balancing kids who will pay full price and kids who will do well at college, which creates a funny situation where you've got a well off heavy-majority-white party crowd with low test scores and a smaller and more diverse group of subsidized kids who bring many academic and non-academic talents (the music/sports/math/science/high school leadership crowd that may not have well-off parents).

If you run a college then selecting people who will do well should maximise your graduation rate. Of course if this is what should be optimised is an open question.

Or you could keep graduation rate constant and make the taught material harder.

Which will lead to a revolution if you have paid colleges.

People apply, pay for a year or two, inevitably fail, but are now also 30k in debt.

What do you think those people will do?

Accepting anyone only works in countries without paid universities.

I can try: universities differ in rigor and students differ in capability. A student gets the most out of education (and becomes more capable) when presented with a challenge just below his threshold. Put him in a program that's too hard, and he'll have a shitty time while learning nothing and wasting a lot of money before washing out. Put him in a program that's not hard enough, and he'll succeed within it but his growth will be suboptimal.

Match students to the colleges that will be hard enough to get them to grow, but not so hard that they fail.

>on what basis is "how well they will do at college" the right metric use for selecting who to accept?

Well, the underlying basis is the finite number of seats for students. If you have a limited number of slots, you must reject some applicants. Therefore, the question flipped around is, "what criteria to use to reject applicants?"

That leads into what I guess your usage of "basis" is actually about: the philosophy of selecting on the "doing well" instead of some other criteria such as... "economic disadvantages?"... or "local student over out-of-state or foreign student?"..."athletic abilities?", etc. You'd have to expand on what alternatives you had in mind.

I think the "doing well" criteria can be defended by filling up the limited seats with students who will get the most out of college. For example, a student taking "Physics I" needs to know what derivatives are (Calculus). Having some slots used up by students that should have been in remedial math courses (Algebra) instead of flunking out of PHYICS1 is unfair to the potential students who already have the baseline math skills required for solving physics equations. Multiply that example across the entire curriculum required for a degree and the "doing well" criteria seems justified. You want to reject potential students who are not able to succeed at college-level course work. Maybe tests like SAT are bad/flawed but so far, they appear to be the "least bad" tool to predict which students will do well in college.

One can create institutions that don't care about the assessment of "doing well" as an entrance criteria as long as the students pay the fees. That signal is provided by many colleges[1] that don't require SAT/ACT scores. However, the prestige and respect of those institutions don't match the ones that do. That negative perception in the marketplace is not uncorrelated to their acceptance criteria. (E.g. University of Phoenix.)

[1]http://www.collegexpress.com/lists/list/colleges-that-do-not...

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