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Comment by perfmode | Hacker News Reader

Can you make an argument why this would be considered about “outcome” for the purpose of conversation?

I grew up in a poor, dangerous neighborhood as a child. Later in my teens I lived in a wealthy suburb with collectible cars in the driveway after my father's startup succeeded.

My father was physically abusive, and child services got involved. My father's lawyers sorted things out to get the investigation to stop and drop charges if I lived somewhere else. I unfortunately went into the Troubled Teen industry (which I had definitively no reason to be in other than as part of his lawyers' story blaming me for what happened). That industry is filled with abuse.

The day I turned 18 I was pulled from there and struggled with homelessness for a year. It was extremely hard to succeed when you are homeless.

Financial aid for university is tied to your childhood guardian's social security number until you are 25, so I was a homeless person, and not eligible for any financial aid.

This is just a start. I've never broken any laws or done anything particularly wrong.

Did you ever think of my story? Apparently bureaucrats didn't.

Also, why should I need permission from some bureaucrats to study from the top degree programs? Shouldn't the goal be the opposite: to expand the best education opportunities to as many people as possible?

We have so much wealth and enormous social spending in America, and yet look at our outcomes with homelessness, poverty and suicide...

People shouldn't be viewed as financially coupled to their parents until 25. Our current system is set up to discourage people from furthering their educations, with exorbitant tuition and fees.

If you had been in the Netherlands, you'd get a stipend of ~$10k per year when enrolling in school, and other countries have similar systems. UBC in Vancouver, Canada generally pays masters students $30k a year, having had a few friends depart to Canada due to said offer.

The adversity score, as far as I can see, gives high scores to students who succeed in worse school districts. While none of the sites reporting on this bothered to link to any kind of official announcement, it looks like this may be a refinement of the tool announced here in 2016: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/pr...

From the college board's description of the tool, it weights applicant scores by the quality of their neighborhood and high school. So a disadvantaged student whose family focused on moving to a neighborhood/school where lots of students succeed is not given a high score in this analysis.

The OP had the same opportunity, but because they did the traditional things for a poorer family to encourage their students to succeed (moving to a good school district and sacrificing on the commute) they will be considered a privileged student in this analysis.

>The OP had the same opportunity, but because they did the traditional things for a poorer family to encourage their students to succeed (moving to a good school district and sacrificing on the commute) they will be considered a privileged student in this analysis.

Compared to the poor students whose parents didn't make those sacrifices, they are privileged.

In general, if you make a sacrifice to earn something, that something isn't a privilege.

Your parents making a sacrifice isn't the same thing as you making a sacrifice.

If my dad makes a sacrifice by working 100 hours a week to buy me a Maserati, the car is definitely a privilege not something I earned. And yeah, I may have lost out on spending time with my dad, but that wasn't a choice I made, so while it cost me something it wasn't a sacrifice on my part.

I agree, but do we really want to disincentivise parents sacrificing for their children's education? I'm fine with taxing Maseratis at whatever rate, not so fine with this.

For society as a whole I don't think it is particularly beneficial to encourage people to move to rich neighborhoods/better school districts. The other factors are so far removed from most individual's control that I don't think we'll see much of an impact on behavior.

Sometimes it's hard to see the second order effects of our actions, but it seems pretty clear cut how society will be affected if you punish people willing to invest in their childrens' education.

I don't think that encouraging people to move to rich neighborhoods with better schools is necessarily beneficial for society as a whole.

For many Asian-American's their children's education is a dream that they plan out and sacrifice for so that their kin can have better opportunity than what they managed for themselves. Many are tightly knit families where children look after parents or other close family members later in life. To penalise and denigrate the efforts of such families as "privilege" is awful.

Many White, Black, and Hispanic families do the same thing. It's not denigrating that sacrifice to acknowledge that being born into cohesive, supportive family that values hard work is a privilege that many poor children do not have.

I guess we will have to disagree. When you are penalizing such efforts, you are most certainly denigrating them.

Harvard has need based scholarships. These need based scholarships directly reduce the amount of children of wealthy parents who get into Harvard.

Are need based scholarships denigrating the hard work of wealthy parents?

Are you truly comparing the scholarship need-based policies of one wealthy, private college to a fundamental change in the Scholastic Assessment Test used nation wide ? You have a choice to apply to Harvard - there is very little choice apart from SAT/ACT for higher education in the states.

Are you avoiding the question? I'll rephrase it. If I give $5k dollars per year for college to every student in America whose parents make under $100k a year, am I denigrating the hard work of the parents who make more than that?

If I give $5k dollars per year, for college, to every student in America whose parents make under $100k a year, am I denigrating the hard work of the parents who make more than that?

No, you certainly are not. But this is completely different from adding a hidden adversity score to the SAT. Your proposal is equality of opportunity to earn merit. The other proposal is manipulation of outcome to negate merit.

Equal opportunity vs equal outcome is just a matter of perspective. If we take the desired outcome as can complete college then both proposals are attempting to provide equal opportunity.

Declaring that one denigrates people while the other doesn't based solely on outcome vs opportunity requires arbitrarily picking an observation point that supports your view.

From any remotely objective view-point, a policy that chooses to add a hidden adversity score based on poverty, single-parenting and perceived hardship to a test that is designed as a measure of your scholastic ability is most certainly denigrating to folks who have chosen to lift themselves out of that adversity through experience of great adversity!

A policy that gives 5K to low-income families to allow their children to compete effectively on the SAT is not denigrating.

I firmly believe that if you pose this question to the world, a near complete majority of people will rule the latter is fair, the former is not. There is no arbitrary pick of an observation point here. These are two completely different policies.

And the first sentence is strange. If equal opportunity versus equal outcome is a merely a matter of perspective, then you can draw your lines even further! After all, whatever effects poverty and weaker education had on students in their ability to perform on the SAT certainly won’t have disappeared once they stroll across the campus green!

You can contribute the hidden adversity scores to course grades, contribute it to graduate honors, contribute it further to employment opportunity and promotion. You can draw your line at retirement and benefits if equal opportunity vs equal outcome is merely a matter of perspective.

Yes, of course you can because the distinction is arbitrary. What people decide to think of as outcome vs opportunity tends to reflect the distinction that benefits them the most.

Even the definition of merit and earned achievement is largely arbitrary. I'm successful because of the way I was created and raised. It's not a personal accomplishment.

Hard work should be rewarded because it's a basically useful for society to do so, not because it's some kind of absolute moral imperative.

To the extent that this proposal ceases to award hard work, from a societal perspective, it's gone too far. However it doesn't come close to doing that.

Looking at the metrics they're using, the only likely widescale impact on behavior is that people are less likely to move to rich neighborhoods with high scoring schools. I don't see this as a problem.

The student is not making the sacrifice, the parent is. The student has the privilege of benefiting from their parents' sacrifices.

> The student has the privilege of benefiting from their parents' sacrifices

And that sacrifice will be for nought, due to adversity scoring.

This is a very bad idea.

How would the sacrifice be for naught? The kid is presumably smarter and harder working and better prepared for success no matter what college they go to.

But for college admissions, I don't think it is unreasonable to judge a kid for how well they did relative to the advantages they were given.

How does a child earn hard-working parents? They don't: they won the genetic lottery.

They are imperfect phrases, but generally an equality of opportunity in this case refers to no matter what you look like, what your parents do, how much money you have, if you get a SAT score and GPA above a threshold, you get accepted into the school.

Whereas equality of outcome would focus more on who gets in even if it means treating people differently based on what they look look, how much money they have, where they live, etc.

SAT scores and GPA are strongly affected by how much money you have.

Yes, because intelligent parents tend to make more money. And their children tend to be more intelligent as well.

That's part of it. But even when adjusting for IQ, parental income is highly correlated with success--SAT scores, college admission, lifetime income--however you want to measure it.

Similarly, the wind is strongly affected by weathervanes.

Are you sure you're not confusing causation?

I can, just off the top of my head, think of several situational variables impacted by wealth, which impact cognitive capacity:

- sleep - diet - training - study time

Because it's an attempt to change the outcomes of the test to make them more equal than they would be otherwise.

They are using neighborhood income level and status to adjust the outcome of the SAT.

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