T.M. Landry and the Myth of Meritocracy in Education
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This is quite interesting: completely average students who normally would have no chance of admission can handle ivy league educations. It does appear that exclusive universities are not selecting the smartest 18 year olds in the land but bestowing a title of permanent employment and business advantage on a select group of people of average intellect.
Cal Tech students are admitted purely on academic merit and they’re the only elite university in the US with a significant drop out rate. I doubt they have any graduates who aren’t in the top percentile.
In practice you’re mostly right. Look at schools like Yale Law or France’s École Nationale d’Administration[1] where the student body is so smart that half of them would pass the exams if handed the reading list and syllabus for the exams and given a year to prepare.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/École_nationale_d%27administra...
Is that unusual?
If being able to learn independently from a textbook was normal boot camps would not exist.
And is your statement about the average class of 15 year olds based on research or is it pure speculation?
My statement about the average class of 15 year olds is based on my exposure to the children I tutor, having been a 15 year old myself, observation and a certain amount of reading in the psychological literature, mostly the monotonic increase in conscientiousness that goes at least into the late twenties.
I actually have great respect for the capacity of teenagers to learn and achieve; I just think very little of their discipline. I’ve no doubt at least a third of the average high school class could do lambdaschool’s front end or data science course. Given a similar level of support, scheduling and structure I’m sure at least a quarter could complete the curriculum of many Master’s degrees. But the average college student is older, more conscientious and smarter than the average 15 year old. Twenty percent drop out. More graduate in six years than in four. The average 15 year old is in no way prepared to self study given just text books and a syllsbus.
> The student in the most viral video, who spent only a short time at Landry, is in his first semester at Harvard. Other Landry students have been admitted to Harvard over the past three years, but the university declined to provide information on their status.
> For yet other Landry students, particularly those who spent multiple years at the school, the results after graduation have been disappointing. Some have withdrawn from college, or transferred to less rigorous programs.
In any case, we've long known before T.M. Landry that students who have below-par academic credentials on paper can succeed in the Ivies. Jared Kushner, one of the most powerful men in the country right now, was accepted into Harvard despite reportedly having a mediocre GPA and test scores: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-ku...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/tm-landry-college-prep...
The exact same thing happens in amateur sports and is why athletes with any hope of making it to the Olympics/pro will go to great lengths to find the best coaches and best teams to play on.
- Liz Swaney, the woman who may have singlehandedly gotten the Olympic Committee to add a minimum acceptable skill level qualification (TBD) [0]
- Did you happen to catch any of the men's curling in PyeongChang? [1]
- And who could forget the inspiration behind _Cool Runnings_? [2]
[0]https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/19/elizabeth-swaney-olym...
https://www.archery360.com/2017/05/26/celeb-world-class-arch...
Here's a reasonable example: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetorch/2018/02/20/587356461/h...
It didn’t work for Dan McLaughlin when he tried to go from nothing to pro in golf.
If we make a more modest criterion like "be within x% of the victor" or more interestingly "beat the records from an older olympics", then it gets more doable. Look at how many people can run a four minute mile now, for example.
> simply with training and dedication
The training is expensive and takes over your entire life, and the dedication required is really the thing people empathise with Olympic athletes for. In some sense the real achievement is not giving up.
So, I think the OPs point was, if you could compare one individual with themselves they would perform/grow better in an environment with more performing peers.
I would add, not everyone with the “raw talent” can deal with the stress and pressure of competitive environments the same way.
It's obvious when you look at people and conclude from, say, physical stature, that a person is exceedingly unlikely to succeed as a professional linebacker. But somehow we do not even allow for the possibility of our cognitive limits being set by a combination of our genes and our experiences.
If, say, 10% of the students who were admitted this way succeeded would you change your mind? To me this sounds like the faked credentials allowed the students to skip the first filter (admissions), but that there was a second filter (top tier classes) that most of them failed.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2000/09/01/playing-with-number...
She was shocked at how poor the actual academic standards at the latter "prestigious" organisation were - even though everyone spent a lot of time congratulating themselves for being at a top law school. It was much more difficult to get into that law school (unless you were "connected" of course) - but they really didn't expect much of people once they were there.
I don't think that elite colleges are a racket who hand out privilege like lottery tickets.
It has been shown in previous studies that people accepted to elite colleges and who don't attend do as well in life as those accepted who do attend. So that does suggest that the advantage is that elite colleges simply are able to select from people who are already very talented and confer no advantage through mere attendance.
On the other hand we have the Landry case. These were not random students but students who had been through a fairly unorthodox education to date, granted one that some have claimed to be fraudulent. However that education involved self study and online classes and possibly may have introduced students to the self discipline and initiative in study needed to succeed.
There are also cases such as Jaime Escalante and a few others who did things such as take over a class of the worst performing drop out bone headed students at a failing school, brought them enough up to speed to be able to score well on the AP Calculus test, and to this day all of them are doing much better than any of their peers who did not have Jaime Escalante as a teacher who said he believed in them and did something that enabled them to get into good colleges when their previous chance of getting into any college at all was nil.
These are not normal teachers though. The commonality is that all of them have been accused of fraud when their students do well. But their students do do well.
This isn't accurate. Jaime Escalante spent years setting up a multi-year pipeline into his class. His students were selected and trained up to the standard he could enforce before they met him specifically.
He's an example of effective management and academic tracking more than effective teaching. (It is true that he achieved much more with the students he was responsible for than would be expected based on demographics.)
Ivy League schools don’t look for the smartest 18 year olds. The intent is to make them the smartest 22+ year olds.
That is an incorrect assumption. The elite institutions want people who will be part of the elite. The big draw for these is networking opportunities. If one of your dorm mates is a Justice, the other a Senator, and the third a CEO of a Fortune 500, when you say found a startup, you are going to be able to pitch your idea to some very powerful and wealthy individuals. Now how do these elite institutions make sure they get future elites. Well, throughout human history and even now, the most likely way to become elite is having parents who are elite. So students who have elite parents are disproportionately represented. The other way to be elite is to have extraordinary talent combined with extraordinary determination combined with some luck. The colleges therefore use test scores/ extracurricular activity etc to select for these people. It is no coincidence that the founders of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook all came from elite institutions as have a majority of Presidents and Supreme Court Justices. The benefit of an elite institution is not the curriculum but who your classmates are.
(Of course, if I was one of those "children of the rich and powerful" I'd probably choose the first school - much better environment for finding opportunities to invest in. Less competition, after all)
Case in point: I went to a public selective-admission high school where the average SAT scores were comparable to an Ivy (probably 1,450 when I went, over 1,500 today). That's higher than the top private secondary schools. 15 years later, folks are mostly pretty successful (doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists) but not exactly masters of the universe. Nothing compared to what you might see in a cohort of Andover or Exeter grads.
This argument is getting very tiring, and increasingly dangerous. There's a laundry list of reasons coming from a poor background is disadvantageous. Especially growing up without a father and with poor nutritional intake.
If we handwave all inequities away with discrimination, then actual, internal problems will never be solved. That goes for all marginalized minorities.
But correcting those problems would require eliminating wealth inequality and disrupt the idyllic lives of the elite. Our attention is directed to discrimination precisely in order to prevent the solution of these actual, internal problems.
We saw the battle clearly in 2016. Hillary's identity politics vs Sander's raceless socialism, and we all know which side Wall Street, Democratic insiders (AKA superdelegates), and the leftist media were on.
I think any attempt to blame the underclass for their situation is simply ignorant of the problems faced by people who don't have access to those things, and the reasons why people whose best hope appears to lie outside the "norms of civil society" choose not to obey the norms of a system which is set up primarily to preserve wealth - that is, to preserve their exclusion and subjugation.
It's nonetheless a mistake to presume that such subjugation "preserves" wealth. It actively destroys wealth, whether or not it functionally preserves an existing social hierarchy.