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Comment by jshowa3 | Hacker News Reader

This is why all college should be subsidized by taxes. There should be no "elite schools". It should be first come, first serve taking into account admissions criteria.

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More like we should remove holistic admissions and put entrance exams for the top schools. This is the closest we can come to enforcing a "merit" based system. We should extend this to people of any age so as to not fall into the Asian trap of "what school you go to determines your path in life".

You forget that there is a significant and very vocal segment in education and academia opposed to such standardized exams as the exams are perceived to undermine equity and social justice.

Which may very well be a valid point, given the explosion of the SAT prep cottage industry.

Most people who go to ivy league are already from the top 1%. From statistics i read a while ago, like 30-40% of ivy league students have household income 300,000 +. There will never be a world in which a child of a single mother working a minimum wage job will ever have a fair competition against a double household of both doctors as parents but with exams this unfairness is slightly reduced. At the very least, unqualified people with rich parents won't get a free ride. The whole elite school MO of admitting a couple under-qualified poor kids is just lip service so people don't question the real injustice going on.

> Most people who go to ivy league are already from the top 1%

That's way off. Harvard is 15% from the top 1% [1], and that's typical for Ivy League.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

The top 1% shouldn't be about wealth period. It should be about holistic merit with first come, first serve basis. It should be accessible to anyone. Wealth is what caused celebrities to pay millions of dollars for guaranteed admittance.

That's not merit based at all. All it does is enforce the concept that passing X test gets you in when there's much more than passing X test. Test anxiety is a very real thing. Not to mention, you can train yourself to pass a test, which is a reason why peoples scores improve after re-takes. Its much harder to train creative expression through portfolio demonstration.

There should be no elite school, because the education is the same anywhere.

Case in point, if you watched the Bernie Sanders CNN debate, they had someone (white) from Harvard University ask Bernie if he wanted to turn the US into Soviet Russia which is probably the stupidest question I've ever heard posed against Bernie or any candidate.

I can only assume that the person chose to ask such a question because they are: a) surprisingly ignorant b) offered something generous by CNN to say it c) didn't believe what they were asking but did it anyway d) didn't go to Harvard, but lied

all but one put Harvard in a bad light.

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