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Comment by dannykwells | Hacker News Reader

This presupposes that colleges truly want their admission process to be fair, which they absolutely don't. Then, how would they get to admit legacy students with wealthy parents?

Also, admitting that getting admitted is based on luck directly contradicts the narrative of meritocracy in college admissions, which would decrease the perceived prestige of the school. So yeah, no way would Harvard go for this.

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I think that a lottery without a qualification threshold would contradict meritocracy. In contrast, I don't think a threshold-based lottery contradicts meritocracy. Rather it can be interpreted as a claim that meritocracy cannot be properly quantified beyond a certain precision (which in this case is the threshold). Even if you disagree with that premise, it's substantially different than the rejection of meritocracy altogether.

I also don't think it presupposes anything about what colleges want. What colleges want isn't relevant to a claim about what would be more fair. The paper this article is based on doesn't make an argument for how to force or persuade colleges to espouse the system. It only argues that this system is closer to a platonic ideal of admission fairness.

But how is that threshold itself determined? Seems like it's completely arbitrary and at the discretion of the institution.

It would also probably dramatically worsen the grade inflation that's already rampant at a lot of the elite feeder high schools that pump people into the Ivies (and rampant at Harvard itself[1], fwiw).

1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/...

Good question! I think you can come up with different models for how to define a threshold, and I'm not done reading the paper the article is based on. But implicit in any discussion of a threshold is the idea that the threshold has to be explicit. You can't realistically hold a lottery for ostensible fairness maximization without publicly defining your baseline for lottery eligibility.

An institution can make a threshold high enough that a sample task from the admission exam is considered hard and selective enough. It can still have it sufficiently low that the number of applicants passing it is 10-30-100 times higher than the number of admissions, so that the lottery effect is not lost.

I think the point is too subtle to be broadly appreciated. Any crack in the dam of meritocracy is likely to become a flood. The illusion must be preserved.

wrt to point 2: I guess it's about perspective. It's fine to propose systems that in theory would be nice but without an eye towards what could actually work, what's the point?

Not everything has to have direct practical implications in order to be valuable to read.

Why is any "crack" in the "dam" of meritocracy likely to become a flood? I don't necessarily disagree, but I don't see any specific evidence justifying that claim.

Hypothetically a threshold-based admission lottery would cast more sunlight on the admissions process since:

1. you'd cease having nonpublic, ill-defined measures for admission above the baseline; and

2. you'd have to publish the threshold in any realistically accountable system.

We can argue about whether or not such a system would be (willingly) embraced by universities, but I don't see how the system itself destroys meritocracy. It seems more accurate to say it simply denies meritocracy can be meaningfully measured above a certain baseline of qualification. That only obliviates meritocratic differences above your defined baseline.

Is your contention that the baseline itself would simply shift the uncertainty "downwards" to maintain the status quo?

A good example of the crack/flood analogy is the current H1B visa system. You do have to be qualified to apply, but if enough people qualify a year, they distribute the spots randomly. Eventually the general public started referring to it as "H1B lottery" and assume it's all a matter of luck.

I mean because at that point it is a matter of luck. You can pretend it's not but when everyone is qualified there stops being a real difference between candidates. I think a lottery for higher education works the same. At joe blow public school that may not be true but at an institution like Harvard, they receive so many qualified applicants they could probably choose and entire class full of any one special interest group and still leave out qualified candidates. The difference between student A and B don't really matter when they are both exceptional

Don't know about Harvard, but I was involved with interviewing candidates for CS admissions at Oxford. Everyone involved that I worked with most definitely wanted to admit the best, most capable students and could not care less about legacy students or wealth.

The institutions in "the West" are really not as bad as some of us would like to think. Furthermore, undermining the public faith in these institutions can serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy - for example, making some brilliant applicants not even try to apply to a good University, believing it is biased against them.

Is that the same university that admits more from eight private schools than from 3/4 of the state school system? Yep, sounds like a fair system. Cool story bro.

I doubt this is because of a biased admissions process. It could be a variety of factors:

1. Differences in encouragement from parents, teachers etc. Differences in how much emphasis is put on education.

2. Related to #1 - state school kids may think they are not good enough and not apply.

3. Actual quality of education may be significantly better at those schools, especially in certain subjects.

4. Genetic potential - some traits that allow kids to do well academically may well be genetic, so it could be that the parents would also have those traits, be better off economically because of it, and send their kids to good schools because of the combination of valuing education and being able to afford it.

I know many US universities correlate the admitted student high scool GPAs and high school attended with how they performed at university, and then use that to handicap new applicants. i.e. Candidates from Public School A with a 4.0 GPA tend to graduate with a 2.9 GPA whereas candidates from Private School B with a 3.0 GPA tend to graduate with a 3.3 GPA

...really, the quality of education at Eton is better than a school in inner London where you are in a class with 35 other people, 90% of whom don't speak English? That information surprises me...what insights.

The point is that:

1. The gap is very large. Those schools are only graduating a few thousand compared to hundreds of thousands students in state schools. Even if you compare with institutions that receive a huge number of applications from private schools (e.g. Edinburgh, Durham), the effect is disproportionate.

2. We need to make use of people who have the most ability. It is foolish in the extreme to suppose that going to Eton or having the right parents makes you a capable adult. You say the admissions process isn't biased...but we are optimising for whether you attended Eton. Speak to someone who didn't attend Eton or similar, and ask them if you think that is fair.

Btw, I went to a private school and went to a good university (that takes from private schools to a very high degree), and worked as an equity analyst (so meeting C-level execs and fund managers who mostly went to Oxbridge) your views are just generally very very wrong. These people are not capable or unusually smart. They just grew up in a safe environment with class sizes of less than 30 people. And UK management teams are, comparatively, very weak because there is no real meritocracy here. Sure, there are some good managers but this is basically certain in a large enough sample. And if someone has come up the hard way, they are usually a much safer bet. It is kind of crazy that you have picked one of the most busted, unmeritocratic societies in the world...and tried to show how it is actually fair...

>2. Related to #1 - state school kids may think they are not good enough and not apply.

To back this up, nobody else at my college applied. After I did on a whim, I discovered there was an aptitude test to pass, which I didn't. I blame my negligence for failing but I imagine people from more prestigious colleges & sixth forms would have been aware earlier and had help studying for it. Or even had private tutoring specifically for it.

Not only that, it would turns the elite of the country into plebs. We can't have that, can we? Many good jobs in prestigious companies are open first to Ivy League Grads.

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