Harvard University is fighting to keep its admissions process under wraps

There's also a difference in mindset - there's an appreciation of knowledge for knowledge's sake, and there's a presumption that you can get up to speed with the basics of things quickly even if it is outside of your subject. I distinctly remember discussing calcium channels with the medical students (at an event where there was also a lot of drinking), and discussing economics with the economists.

From my first hand experience as a graduate student at MIT, a lot of the research produced at MIT generates a disproportionate amount of buzz - essentially identical work (in terms of quality) produced by a student in a "tier 3" school will not generate the same kind of recognition. The reasons for this lie in the network effects; people read and cite people who they can attest to with less effort and scrutiny.

The points regarding the instructors and student body are definitely valid and should not be ignored.

I've been heavily involved in interviewing, from the hiring side. You are actually correct.

From the hiring party's perspective, the cost of interviews is the time of the current employees administering them. The candidate's entire resume is thus taken into account before making the expensive decision to fly them over and have 5-10 people interview them in person.

In other words, there certainly is some weight given to a candidate's educational credentials, but it's almost completely limited to the decision whether to interview them at all.

Once a candidate is in front of an interviewer, their resume only matters as a jumping point into live discussion, typically of topics like past projects and interests. The brand of their school makes zero difference at this point.

> It's hard for younger people to avoid this, and when I did a lot of interviewing in my 20's I think I was too skewed by this, not having the opportunity to know really what all of that meant.

The unpleasant truth is that unless you interviewed with some extremely inefficient employers, you were not rejected due to your school brand, but due to your perceived interview performance.

Nobody flies a candidate for a full day of interviews just to reject them based on something that was already known.

Not every candidate from a top school is smart. There's plenty of terrible candidates from top schools, and they bomb interviews just like everybody else, and when they do they get rejected.

Finally, I'd say that nowadays, the benefit of the handful (say top 10) schools is far less obvious. There's plenty of "2nd-tier" engineering schools that will easily get you into most interviewing processes.

I agree with basically everything you said except this part. These schools very actively attempt to boost their brand. OTOH, silicon valley stands out as being one of the few places to place relatively less weight on such pedigrees and has even developed alternatives, e.g. the Thiel fellowship.

Mind you - at least these days law has changed and nobody really cares about how posh your relatives are, just how much money they have....

The point is that if you go to a target school doing Math olympiads throughout your school life, the admissions exam and interview is a walk in the park. The applicants who didn't have any of this preparation can still do well but will fare relatively worse against that group, and I think this is very obvious in the ultimate intake.

This is laughable. There are many, many people who have worked at admissions at elite schools, and they will tell you the contents of the "black box". What they would say goes something like this:

1. There are 10-30% of the entering class that we know we want.

2. The rest we have to fill with essentially clones (smart but unexceptional students).

3. We choose the clones that we think will make our school a better place in the short term and long term. Due to the multitude of variables that are introduced in selecting from the clones, it looks like our decisions are capricious. Maybe they are for the clones, but the clones aren't where we are looking to find our big winners in the admissions process.

Read some of the stuff by Cal Newport. He's closer to the right track than anything else I've seen.

Why would it devalue them with their target audience?

Legacy applicants are X% more qualified naturally (well educated parents, etc), and get Y% from the admissions. Given the numbers for Harvard, MIT, etc, there are plenty of qualified applicants for each spot.

Most of my extended family is Chinese-born. This cohort (educated, upper middle class and above) definitely raises better test-takers. They are statistically much less likely to divorce and much less likely to be on public assistance. I value these traits enormously myself.

It is not clear to me they are better children. Personal anecdata shows that many of these kids were raised with such obsessive concern with getting into Ivy League colleges that they are not complete adults, and often don't know what to do with their lives when they graduate.

First, it doesn't have to be, and was never necessarily meant to be, second, it depends on how you define your 'epistemological' criteria.

To my point: 'just using SAT scores' would be basically a very bad way to select students.

For example, some US States high schools may focus intensely on 'SAT prep'. Others may have a policy of not prepping at all. Some candidates speak English as their second language and are at a big disadvantage.

"We should celebrate the Asian focus of intellectual excellence rather than punish them."

This is 'intellectual excellence' on some level, but I view the 'race to perfect SAT' as competitive, not intellectual.

We can all work 12 hours a day from the age of four, but is that what we want? In South Korea, they literally had to ban doing homework after 10 pm, because it was a social malaise. This is a cultural attribute, on the whole, it's certainly better than kids 'not doing homework', but my experience with South Korean students at Grad School has informed me that I don't think that this is really what we want, nor is it actually very productive. (Too clarify about my South Korean compatriots - it's they who were complaining that during their summer internships at home, they would be paid meagre wages, literally a couple thousand dollars a month - after a lifetime of intensely competitive academic endeavour)

There are a number of factors at play and I think 'representation' is one of them, on some level.

Also, I'm the last person to be pushing intersectional arguments, I'm generally wary of it all, and totally opposed to 'proportional representation' and that kind of stuff. I'm saying - it's a factor, that's all.

First, I’m going to remove the “Asian” aspect of your comment, because I don’t think the phenomenon you are speaking of is uniquely Asian.

Let me frame it slightly differently.

One group, let’s call them TestPreppers, are excellent at acing tests. Yes, these types of students are common is East Asia (e.g., due to the cram school culture), but they can be found other places as well (e.g., upper middle class communities in the US NE corridor regardless of race).

The second group, let’s call them ThinkersDoers, are really good at identifying interesting problems and doing constructive work on that problem. These folks tend to be smart, creative, and hard working. They exist is all races (including, but not limited to, Asians).

In an academic setting or some professions that have domain specific hard problems to work on, the TestPreppers are largely terrible to work with. Lots of hand holding. Lots of training. Outcomes are predictable but uninspiring. They are great grinders. That said, they will almost never contribute anything positive to your work group other than a willingness to do grunt work that others don’t want to do. Note that the doing the grunt work is valued, but finding grinders is not hard. The VAR (value above replacement — a sports stats term) is basically zero.

The ThinkersDoers, however, will provide unique insights about the problem space and will advance the team in unique and valuable ways. Their VAR is very high — these folks are so difficult to find at any level. These folks are incredibly fun to work with, and you are very sad when they leave the team.

I really wish that we, regardless of race, would encourage the development more ThinkersDoers rather than focus on the relatively mundane TestPreppers. Raising a TestPrepper (to the exclusion of anything else) just seems like a wasted opportunity to develop a ThinkerDoer who has the opportunity to move the needle much more substantially in any endeavor they choose to persue.

What you are talking about makes sense for something like the IIT in India - and take a look at the huge number of students who run from that environment to a liberal arts education in the US.

To shed more light on your position - by extension we can ask why someone has to study electives and waste so much time on it.

Merit is measured on the subjects that are part of their degree.

The US college education is faced with a definitional crisis - they are tooled for a different era, when a college education wasn’t something every citizen was expected to get.

"Holistic admissions criteria emerged at Ivy League schools in the early 20th century and were almost immediately twisted for virulently anti-semitic purposes. Until the 1920s, students took an admissions test and those that did well on the test were admitted to the colleges “almost entirely on the basis of academic criteria.” This resulted in lots of Jewish men on the campus of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.

An alumni visiting the Harvard campus around this time was shocked by the scene: 'Naturally, after 25 years, one expects to find many changes, but to find that one’s University had become so Hebrewized was a fearful shock. There were Jews to the right of me, Jews to the left of me, in fact they were so obviously everywhere that instead of leaving the Yard with pleasant memories of the past I left with a feeling of utter disgust of the present and grave doubts about the future of my Alma Mater.'

It’s around this time that Ivy League schools switched from a strictly quantitative system of test scores to a more subjective, holistic approach."

https://priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite-colleges-...

Going on a tangent, imo this blog post as one of the starting points of the current spate of lawsuits. The impact and reach of YC companies is huge.

I don't think people here understand Harvard University. The funny thing is, this level of misunderstanding is so naive and naively self-righteous that it might actually destroy the cesspool. So, good.

You actually can set up objective criteria for entry to a college. That some groups perform better than others in no way means they are not objective.

The unwillingness to accept the possibility that objective criteria might not result in equal outcomes from all groups is the problem. The rabbit hole of "that can't be objective because it challenges my assumption that all groups would perform equally" only ends in bad places.

'just having the right parents will push your sores up on average'

That has little to do with the objectivity or subjectivity of the test. There can be a wide variation of social development between racial groups, economic classes, religious communities, geographic regions etc. Not to mention individual IQ and ability.

A standardized test in say, mathematics is objective. The same tests that demonstrate competency are administered all over the world in every country and culture in the world. You can objectively determine the level of ability of any given student regardless of race or culture.

To simply say that because disparity exist we should therefor abandon standards and objective criteria in favor of a set of morphological corrective fictions that look good on paper but do nothing to fix the disparity is diminishing for everyone.

The problems are simply much harder and more complicated then peoples egos will let them admit. Its very easy to propose a grand theory that fixes all the problem of the world quickly and completely.

* http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...

* https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/89/2/435/223527...

There is very little room for training in the SAT.

You could formalize it as y=mx+c where C is the candidates current education level, m is the candidate's innate ability to learn and x is the quality of the course, and y is the final quality of the candidate after getting the degree.

All other things are not equal though, and making a judgement only about the C of each candidate does not maximize y. SATs measure C, affirmative action does a really crappy job of trying to estimate m.

... and that also happens in a different way than I think the parent refers to:

When American Major League Baseball, the top professional leagues, began (very gradually) hiring black and Latino players in 1947, it was not affirmative action. In fact it was the end of an affirmative action program for white guys - they had all these jobs specially reserved for them based on their skin color. Many of them were minor-league quality players, who only had their jobs because their skin was white. Generations of black and Latino players simply couldn't get a decent job (the Negro Leagues paid relatively poorly), including some of the best players ever.

(Incidentally, this also helped the statistics of the best players, who regularly batted/pitched against minor leaguers - how many home runs could a modern star hit if maybe a third of the pitchers he faced were minor leaguers?).

The same happens still in other fields - lots of people with jobs that they wouldn't have if they weren't white, male, coming from wealth, etc.

Judging people on their immutable characteristics is always ignorant, counterproductive, and polarizing by definition. There are a myriad of ways for us to help people who have been generally screwed by society that don't involve judging them based on their race or other physical traits. A color blind, class-based affirmative action system would be far, far preferable to anything that Harvard or other proponents of race-based affirmative action are doing. Give an automatic bonus to people who went to school in a poverty stricken area. Give an automatic bonus to those whose parents didn't graduate from college. There are tens of millions of poor, white Americans whose families have lived generations in poverty who rightfully seethe while they sit in their sweltering, air-condioner-free trailers and listen to rich, entitled people talk about the "historic privilege" of whites.