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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The ironic thing about your post is that the adversity score is just accounting for the ways in which children are denied "equality of opportunity." For example, it factors in: "the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s neighborhood." Your post confirms it--why would your dad commute four hours a day to live in a particular neighborhood unless he believed it would confer some unequal, advantageous opportunity for his kids? What about kids whose parents didn't make those sacrifices--did they have equal opportunities to you?

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...and his point is why should his dad make that sacrifice for his kids if the SAT board is just going to subvert his efforts?

Because we don't want to live in a society that so strongly encourages "sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max)" and "My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving."

I'm all about parents sacrificing for their kids, but when the system is set up to push people that far something about the system is broken.

We should absolutely want to live in a society that rewards people for effort and sacrifice. If we do not reward people for doing those things, they won't do them, and you definitely don't want to live in that society.

I wonder if the opposite is true as well. That is, when theses sorts of discussions come up, I'm always asking: when is it over? When does the sacrifice stop? A person sacrifices for their kid for some nebulous better life, which their kid goes on to do for their kids...ad infinitum? However, through an evolutionary lens it make some sense: an individual doesn't have to have time to enjoy any advantage they've accrued through such previous sacrifice because evolution doesn't care if you're happy, just that you're reproducing successfully, and so far that's instilled (it's arguable) an instinctive sense to socially rise in order to obtain better access to such. So in such a sense there really would be no point of it being over (except for the extinction of the species). So why shouldn't someone in this great chain of sacrifice say no and kick their feet up and enjoy the fruits of all that sacrifice? This would explain why we (society at large and various specific social groups) treat the childless so negatively and use the term anti-natalist as a slur.

However, there is another component to it: one's advantage is always relative to others' lack of advantage. This is why equal access education will never be truly supported (no matter what people say); if all kids have the same advantage as their kids, then their kids don't actually have any advantage at all (in social terms).

I think it's just a personal choice everyone makes. How much should they sacrifice now to have more later (either personally, or inter-generationally). We all have different preferences around that, and that's ok. If someone is willing to work harder or sacrifice more, it's reasonable for them to get more reward later on for their efforts. If you prefer to enjoy the present, that's ok too.

"I'm all about parents sacrificing for their kids" <--- Did you skip the part where I wrote this?

Did you skip what I wrote? You say you're all about parents sacrificing for their kids. But why would they bother if their kids won't get any benefit from it?

It's a matter of degree. Some sacrifice = great. Extreme sacrifice = bad.

Is not eating out or taking vacations too much sacrifice?

It is when combined with "commuted 4 hours daily."

I agree. I wouldn't have traded 20 hours a week of time spent with my dad for a better neighborhood.

Yes. Really.

Your family is not model to be aspirational of. Yours is a warning to others.

To be clear, my family did not make those tradeoffs. I'm not the original commenter. But why do you think such a thing is a warning?

Ok my mistake.

> But why do you think such a thing is a warning?

Because it's a bad way to spend your life.

Why should the College Board not recognize that kids in fact have unequal opportunities for reasons totally outside their control?

It's fine to recognize it. But if you say, z-score applicants by their 'adversity score' peer group, then you negate the impact of their parents efforts. If you negate their parents efforts, you make it not worthwhile for their parents to make those efforts in the first place. If you make it not worthwhile to make those efforts, they won't be made. And society as a whole will be worse off for it.

The whole point is to devalue those efforts. I thought OP wanted “equality of opportunity.” You can’t have equality of opportunity if some kids get a head start because of their parents.

In a world where the efforts of parents don't help their kids, parents won't make efforts. This will degrade the educational attainment of all kids. Most people consider this to be a bad thing.

"diminishing the effect outsized parental involvement can have on college admissions" != "efforts of parents don't help their kids"

That really depends on how much diminishing you do. Either way, at the margin, you decrease the return to parental investment. At the margin, parents will invest less.

I really don't like where you are going with this. It is too close to an anti-intellectualism theory for my comfort.

I don't think you can ever eliminate that, short of removing kids from their parents Plato's Republic style.

Adding more rules will just create perverse incentives (e.g. parents incentivized to increase crime rate in their neighborhoods to boost their children's scores.)

I agree that you can’t equality of opportunity without the government taking over the task of raising children. But that undermines OP’s premise. If “equality of opportunity” is not an option, then “equality of outcome” should be on the table.

The crime rate in a neighborhood is actually something kids can control (i.e. they can commit crimes to boost their scores).

The anti-gentrification tactic extended to SATs! I like it!

Because the College Board isn't doing it in a way that truly reflects the adversity each kid faced.

For example, if Alice is raised by two loving parents in a so-so neighborhood she gets a score of 50. If Bob was abused as a child, put into foster care at 10, and adopted into a good neighborhood at 14 he gets a score of 25. Due to Bob's past he is way behind in school but works hard. Bob and Alice both end up getting 1400. At a selective school its possible that because Bob his a lower adversity score his application automatically gets rejected while Alice's application gets looked at and accepted.

This is the kind of case that is possible with an "Adversity Score" that bothers me.

What would it subvert?

You go to a better school, you get a better education, you are more educated and you get a 34 on the ACT.

If you go to a crappy school and you get the same score than there's no qualitative difference between the schools and your parents skipped vacations for nothing.

But obviously the OP must believe there was value in the better school otherwise they wouldn't mention it. So they would believe they would have got a lower score in a different school, and if that's a proxy for education, then the OP must have ended up with a better education, and is also much more likely to succeed at _any_ college they go to, even if it's not Harvard.

I'm not sure what your point is. Nobody mentioned Harvard. This de-values the efforts of parents to improve their kids education. If you devalue something, you get less of it. Simple as that.

Can you spell out how it devalues the efforts of parents to improve their children's education?

Sure. The adversity score looks at things like the crime rate of the neighborhood you grew up in. That neighborhood is (primarily) a function of two things: Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued. Some parents work really hard and pinch every penny to devote resources to their kid's education. Scoring kids based on adversity partially mitigates those efforts for the purpose of getting into college.

> Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued.

So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right? How well you are able to compete for a slot in college should depend on who your parents are?

> So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right?

Yes, for the reasons that I outlined. If you don't reward kids for their parents investment, their parents won't invest, and that will be worse for everyone.

If you spending 1 hour or 10 hours teaching your kids at night makes no difference to their life outcomes, which will you choose?

This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.

There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.

> This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.

Sure that may be true in relative terms. But at the margin, decreased reward -> decreased investment.

> There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.

That sounds like something that could be true, it just isn't. A Harvard degree is mostly about signaling. Once you are accepted to Harvard, you're nearly guaranteed to graduate (the graduation rate is 97.5%). Once you've gotten in, you're set. A huge number of jobs care more about marketing their ivy league staff than the actual skill output of that staff. You can do extremely well with zero talent and a Harvard degree. Obviously having both is better, but the Harvard degree itself confers tremendous value on anyone who has it, even if that person has no real skills or intelligence.

To be clear then, you're not actually talking about quality of education (tutoring, robotics teams, mock trial, great teachers, enrichment activities, science museum trips, history competitions). As you say, it's "ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood". Your primary problem with this, then,is that it devalues the ability to move into rich neighborhoods.

How does the ability to move into a rich neighborhood correlate with college success? I teach math, so that would be a great place to give an example.

My point is this: parents have limited resources. They can devote those resources to things like: nice cars, fancy meals, vacations...or, they can devote them to educating their kids. Asian families notoriously prize devoting every last resource they can to educating their kids. That is a really great thing for society.

However, the adversity score policy being proposed here would blunt the impact of that resource allocation. When you blunt the return to an investment, you get less of that investment. If those same Asian families cannot improve their kids chances by making those sacrifices, then they have no reason to make those sacrifices.

The kid who gets a better education is still better off. High school isn't just a means to an end of going to college; you're learning lots of valuable things while you go there, that will help you for the rest of your life. And you're also being set up for better success in college because of that foundation.

You're exactly repeating OPs reasoning, yet you somehow completely disagree with it.

I don't get you, batbomb. But that's OK sometimes.

You live in a better neighborhood, you get a better education, you likely have healthier food available to you and grocery stores nearby, in addition to a school that probably cares a little bit about that sort of thing. There's still drugs in high school, but they are sold by the rich kids. There's tutors and test prep centers by your school. There's a lower probability of violent crimes and gangs. Sure, your family has to shop at the thrift store, you get hand-me-downs, and you don't get to go to Subway at lunch with your friends.

Somehow, all of that is rendered worthless when somebody going to a shitty school with shitty food wins the shitty school and home life lottery and edges them out of the more prestigious school with lower test scores thanks to the adversity bump.

Ultimately, good school kid must settle for highly regarded state school and post about how unfair the system is on a website for engineers and entrepreneurs. Shitty school kid becomes rich and famous because they went to an Ivy, everybody in the VC office loves them, buys a Tesla and their single mom a mansion.

Just kidding, shitty school kid had to drop out when their mom got sick junior year.

So is it okay then to have poorly educated people in college? This incentivizes everyone moving to a negatively rated district and getting a worse education, because it wouldn't matter, according to the logic.

That's assuming they calculated their adjustments precisely. And if they didn't, then welcome to all sorts of artificial biases in the system where a few more people appointed themselves to determine the fates of many. Congrats on solving nothing at all.

Asian dad should move the family to a shitty neighborhood and spend the saved money on private tutors. Get boosted scores from the “everyone equal” has hood adjustment on top of already good scores from all the tutoring.

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