Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year | Hacker News Reader

Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year

wsj.com

207 pointszachthewf526 comments

I have a hard time understanding the logic here. GPAs are essentially useless, so what else do we have to go off of? "Hollistic admissions" processes seem to be even more skewed towards rich kids, as they have far greater opportunities outside of the class room to pad their resumes in exactly the way that colleges look for. This seems entirely backwards to me.

If there is a systemic bias in test scores, it is still better to have the test score there so you can quantify it, and adjust your admissions policy to account for it. By throwing out the test entirely you are flying blind.

How else are you going to keep the Asians out?

Sarcastically phrased, but it's the real answer. The colleges need to shed objective measures so they can continue their social programs unimpeded by any objective standards that might reveal their increasingly obvious biases.

If you want to get into Harvard, I recommend striving to demonstrate greater fealty to the hardest of hard left-wing ideals than your fellow applicants, as that will become the real criterion for admission as fast as they feel like they can make it.

Couldn't diversity be considered an objectively good thing to strive to have?

Anecdotally, I went to a technical school but some of my biggest shifts in perspective came from interacting with liberal arts and minority students.

Yes. The legal justification for affirmative action getting an exception to anti-discrimination laws is that a diverse student body improves the quality of eduaction for all students; so there is a compelling interest to discriminate.

It certainly doesn't improve the quality of education of the students who were rejected in favor of someone with a different color skin.

By throwing them in a gladiatorial death-match with the Jewish applicants, of course. The winner has an athletic character, and is therefore real Harvard material!

This is like that story where Dershowitz drops into Stephen Jay Gould’s class and asks the students how to deal with a pushy Jewish mother who insists her rejected kid is Harvard material

You are probably being facetious, but my wife is Vietnamese and her parents were boat people who fled the communists, didn't speak any English and had no money, then her dad got a job washing dishes, learned English at night, got into college, then got into medical school, started a chain of clinics, and retired a millionaire. You would not believe how much they despise current "progressive" politics and speaking with them about politics is basically impossible. They and their community / family follow what is happening with things like Harvard and partially as a result they are die-hard Trump supporters (among other things like their belief in religion, police, etc.).

I do not agree with all of these opinions, I am just telling you how this community, which is mostly still poor and not "model minority", views a lot of what is coming out of elite institutions in the name of progress and equality.

Why wouldn't they feel that way? As bad as Trump may be, he isn't trying to keep their kids from following the same successful path.

The same successful path that begins with the US welcoming non-white, non-English-speaking refugees from countries they've bombed? Trump is not actively on the record against all of that?

If they're refugees from South Vietnam, they probably wish the US kept bombing so they didn't have to flee the communists.

Hell, if they were well off in South Vietnam before the communists came, it just goes to show that if your family had the mental foundations necessary for success, even if you hit rock bottom you still have the attitude to climb back up.

Great comment. What's not appreciated is that Asians in the US have the greatest Gini coefficient of any racial group in the US: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/07/12/income-inequality...

John McWhorter made a comment in a Reason interview that affirmative action really should be about socioeconomic status and not race. Back in the day race would have been a highly correlative proxy for income and wealth, but that it is becoming increasingly less predictive and advantaging middle and upper class minorities when today they almost no meaningful disadvantages relative to their white and asian peers of the same socioeconomic class.

The Vietnamese side of my family are refugees too, two MDs, 2 engineers, and one CS professor. Not bad for growing up in public housing and on food stamps.

They see Communism rising in America and support Trump.

See what happens when East Asians from a poor background try to take advantage of affirmative action programs.

Many Russian/Jewish emigrants (including me) feel similarly. To anyone who grew up under communism, the current thought climate is alarming. It's hard to explain to Western folks.

I'm a bit confused, but isn't this a one year response to the effects of Covid? I saw that there were difficulties even with AP exams this year.

Nothing to do with COVID. Harvard systematically discriminates against Asian applicants by giving them lower "personality scores" than other races. There is a big lawsuit about this going on.

Exactly. They had similar quotas to keep Jews out several generations ago.

> Certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies which effectively placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the university. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."[16] As a result, Oshinsky added, "Jonas Salk and hundreds like him" enrolled in New York University instead.[17] Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman was turned away from Columbia College in the 1930s and went to MIT instead. See also Numerus clausus in the United States.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota )

Today it's "too many asians"

Yeah but not anymore. There is a higher jewish population at harvard (~28%) than non-jewish whites (~22%) despite non-jewish whites making up 60% of the population of the US and jews making up less than 2% of the population. No skin off my nose since I went to a mormon school in Utah.

There is clearly an anti-white, anti-asian agenda at these top schools now.

Only 6% of the 2020 class at Harvard self-reported as Jewish. See https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishi...

Anti-asian for sure, probably not as much anti-white since white applicants can get lower academic scores than Asian people and still get accepted. Discriminating against a minority that makes up only 5% of the population is ridiculous.

You'd have a stronger argument if that 5% was still "only 5%" of the colleges. But, it's closer to 15-30% of the student body. That's true at most top colleges across the country AFAIK. When you're getting close to 5-6x the national rate and nearly a third of the university, it's gotta be worth noting, right? No different than any other demographic - I'd hope.

I'm for fair admissions and I'd hope race would not be a factor in admissions - only personal experiences/circumstance. Something that would level the floor a bit more to allow for people of less privileged backgrounds to shine and allow for real diversity of thought into the university environment. That said, it won't likely ever happen. My experience of a school with a 30% Asian student body was not great for many reasons but one reason was how hard it was to make friends. I did not make almost any Asian friends because most of the Asian student body was a very insular group of people. I spoke about this with Asian coworkers/peers who outwardly acknowledged it at the university. Now, I work with Asian coworkers who openly express their interest in being with Asians more than other races. I don't know if that same mentality is as abundant across other groups but imagine going to a school where 30% of the class refuses to interact with you. It does not make for a great student body.

> When you're getting close to 5-6x the national rate and nearly a third of the university, it's gotta be worth noting, right?

It's worth noting and emulating. Punishing success is the path to mediocrity. Instead other groups should take note and ask themselves "what should our community be doing so that we can also emulate the success that that group has had?"

Any solution that doesn't involve trying to trying to get every group to emulate the success of the groups doing it right will eventually lower standards.

There is a soft bigotry in low expectations.

https://1776unites.com/featured-essays/the-1619-project-perp...

I'm not Jewish, but I have nothing but profound respect for that community because they have such great values that they are consistently crushing it and helping one another succeed. Just take the absolute atrocity many of them suffered in WWII and yet 75 years later, many of those that had everything stripped from them have succeeded better than probably any other community would have given the same adversity.

It could be said that their adversity is because they are so good at “helping one another succeed.” Success breeds resentment.

Although, I agree. I just want all cultures to thrive. However, Whites doing this would be called out for nepotism and labeled supremacists in their own countries. You don’t see this reaction in Japan, Israel, Mexico, etc.

You're ignoring what I spoke about and sidelining it into a discussion about how we should want to emulate Asian culture because it has lead to success for them.

You're ignoring how problematic that culture is. It isn't a culture that can be emulated across the board because it's inherently exclusionary. It's not that these groups of people who have risen to the top are helping everyone - they're only helping their own. How should that be a desirable thing unless you're also selfish and discriminatory?

If anyone is only helping those of their own race rather than helping anyone - it's a problematic culture. (And - inherently - racist)

College is a zero-sum game. You either get in or you don't, and there is a limited amount of space. It would be nice if everyone treated each other as a cohesive whole rather than splitting up in groups as you've labeled and desire people to do. That attitude is what creates more divisiveness and tribalism.

You're looking at this way too narrowly.

The dichotomy isn't between helping people outside your community or within your community.

That dichotomy I'm highlighting is between having a culture of helping one another or not having that culture.

The communities that aren't helping those within their community, typically aren't helping people outside their community either. There are plenty of cities and neighborhoods in this country where there isn't much community service, participation in the community and taking pride in helping your community succeed relative to other communities out there. I grew up in a predominantly Jewish town as a kid. The level of involvement from the parents in the school system was off the charts. Since moving away from that community, I've never once seen anyplace else that came even close to that level of civic involvement.

It doesn't even have to be community based on race. It can be as simple as volunteering in your neighborhood or city.

Communities that grow rich have a culture of service to one another whether that community is delineated along racial or geographical lines or if that community is global. The size of the group or whether there is exclusion or not is orthogonal to my point. This culture change is easiest to begin at home and within your community.

One of the big differences I've noticed between liberals and conservatives is that with liberals, community starts with the world, then moves to the country, then the state, then the county, then the city/town, then the neighborhood, then the family. With conservatives it's the opposite. Community and obligation to one another begins with the family and moves to the neighborhood, then the city/town, then county, then state, then country and then world.

That’s what most minorities feel like most of time lol. Imagine being a Latino guy in a school that majority white.

Someone should add this shameful piece to the Harvard wikipedia page as a main section. History will repeat itself if they hide it. I learned of this recently, the President of the college said something along the lines of if we accept x amount of Jewish people then other people won't want to come to the college anymore. Disgusting.

I'm not a conservative, but I agree with this piece by the American Conservative: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of...

Notice how Jewish admissions tanked after the college found a socially acceptable anti-semitic policy.

"GPAs are essentially useless, so what else do we have to go off of?"

I think race will replace the tests.

I think you might have that backward. Test scores are somewhat influenced by the income level of the student's parents: wealthier families can afford to give their kids resources like study time, books, tutors, a home environment that values academic success, etc., that result in higher scores.

A holistic process mitigates that disparity.

I highly doubt the intent of this change is to "favor rich kids" or any of the things in the other comments in this thread, which strike me as exceptionally mean-spirited.

I think the argument is that it's far easier for wealthy families to game metrics that aren't being objectively measured. E.g. they can pay for all sorts of extracurriculars. They know to play up any hint of multiculturalism / diversity. Etc.

Outside of cheating, there's truly a limit as to how much gaming can go into standardized testing.

> I highly doubt the intent...

I don't think the user was making the point that it was an intentional decision, but rather an unintentional consequence.

I don't think Harvard is oblivious to these effects.

High test scores are correlated with income but income is not a causative factor.

Most asian immigrants came here with nothing and much less resources than the caucasians who've already been here for years. They worked hard and performed well on the SATs and got into great schools and as a result are now generating a higher than average income than caucasians.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_Uni...

Not trying to brag about asians here. It's really just part of the culture and it can get really extreme. It stems mostly from parenting... the memes below are really illustrative:

https://www.pinterest.com/lindaschloss/asian-father-memes/

I think one time when I was a kid I mentioned to my dad I was interested in becoming an artist. My dad beat the shit out of me. Now I'm on hacker news and I'm definitely not an artist.

I would argue that what is causing the income disparity is the ability to work hard and study. This ability leads to higher test scores and higher income.

What you mention here is more of a cultural thing.In some, there's emphasis,if not obsession, to make sure the kids do learn so they could go to college/university/whatever. This is also pushed quite heavily at family level too. This may not be the same in other groups.

Its also pushing kids into career directions that they may not really want to do and in some cases are not just suited to.

The only time I have seen some one who was just not suited to development was case of this.

I have a cousin, who's both parents are heavily into medicine and wanted for him the same path,while he only wanted to do anything related to cars. Didn't work out well tbh. Pushing your own kids to learn isn't necessarily a bad thing,but to do so purely with a single goal of getting them into a university and then in a predefined job path, is outright crazy.

Immigration from a lot of Asian countries is also very targeted, like I'm Taiwanese and the weekend Chinese language school literally only had kids who had parents with advanced degrees in STEM. I don't think it should be a surprise that the children of a bunch of phds are doing well academically.

Neither GPAs nor SATs are 'useless' they just need to be contextualized.

SAT scores are also pretty useless, when Harvard has enough applications with perfect scores to fill their class multiple times.

How does that make SAT scores useless?

If every candidate has the same score, the score itself becomes meaningless. Imagine getting 200 identical applications for a job,where all you see is John Smith with x years at corp Y. How do you select the best candidate on this info?

Right so you’re saying they could randomly pick from their applicant pool because right now only perfect scores apply.

But wouldn’t that cease being the case once scores are not taken into account? Presumably (retroactively speaking) I could have applied or my friends could have applied... now if they do a random selection they could get one of us...

This is an excellent question--that should be answered by data. Is there a thresholding effect? It could be that say there's not much difference in a hundred points in the SAT. But, maybe GPAs actually are more predictive. I assume that rec letters are useless to first approximation unless the recommender writes something about the student that raises flags.

>Right so you’re saying they could randomly pick from their applicant pool because right now only perfect scores apply.

This would actually be a reasonable way to go. Set a cut off ACT/SAT/GPA and just do a lottery for kids that are above it. Actual fairness. Of course thats not what HPY + Stanford etc. are interested in. They are still just finishing schools for the elite. If you want actual meritocracy go to MIT or Caltech

Ignoring the results of a test seems like the wrong solution to this problem. Why not make the test harder instead, so that a perfect score could be a ticket to the school of your choice?

Depends on what they want from their students.

Any kid with an excellent (but not necessarily perfect) SAT score will likely be able to complete the coursework and graduate. After that point, why not judge on other aspects of the students lives? Test taking is a skill and outside of academia, not terribly useful.

But now they aren't going to only have applications with perfect scores. They are going to have applications with people that would have had perfect scores and a lot of people that would not have had perfect scores. For this new pool of applicants, that score would be meaningful.

I think you understood the logic perfectly well, holistic admissions are more deliberate and less prone to those pesky objective outside factors.

A very cynical answer to what's the logic here: objective measures get in the way of many non-academic college admission goals, so colleges want to do away with them. One of those goals is racial diversity, and that's the only one colleges openly talk about because it's the only one that can positively impact society. Other goals include raising more money by admitting the children of major donors, improving the prestige of the college by admitting top athletes (even when they lack academic ability and motivation), and connecting the college with as many important and powerful people as possible(to bring both money and prestige to the college, and/or to help high ranking administrators make connections).

Of course colleges do all these things already, but imagine how much easier it will be for them when they don't have these pesky test scores showing the students they want to admit aren't qualified.

I think there’s a silver lining to all of this behavior in that it demonstrates that nothing really matters when it comes to determining if you’ll be successful in college.

Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most. You could replace the SAT and ACT with obscure movie trivia and you’d see roughly the same distribution of scores and it would have the same predictive power. The people who signal that they’re willing to put it a lot of time, money, and effort into their education do well… surprised pikachu.

There’s no such thing as qualified for college outside of a genuine desire and motivation to do it.

So I don’t see any sort of contradiction in colleges admitting people based on novelty, coolness, and straight-up effort.

>Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most.

I was under the impression that SAT prep doesn't move the needle much. Am I mistaken?

Cramming for the test right at the end with SAT prep will add a few points but won’t do anything dramatic.

But if you get put in the “honors” track of a lot of high schools where the name of the game is to teach material informed by the SAT, ACT, AP, and IB teats then you almost can’t help but do well since you’ve been cramming for 4 years.

> since you’ve been cramming for 4 years.

You could say the same for pretty much every educated person who has done an undergraduate or postgraduate degree. Seems like a lot of human progress has been made as the result of people that have been "cramming for 4 years"

Any evidence to support this?

It turns out actually learning the material on a test over the span of a few years helps you do well on the test. That used to be called getting an education.

Right! But the problem is that you don’t actually get much of an education along the way. You get a bunch of not super useful knowledge that you’ve almost surely forgotten and some test taking skills. This is the downfall of so many programs that teach to the test.

The problem with this reasoning is that the SAT isn't an arbitrary test. Presumably the course material came before the SAT was developed to test mastery of the material. Sure, the course material then changes to better capture what the SAT measures, and the SAT adjusts in kind. But this adversarial process doesn't optimize arbitrarily. Learning SAT material (rather than say learning tricks) is learning substantial math and reading skills, the kind that serves you well in college. So characterizing this as anything other than getting an education is disingenuous.

Teaching the test and getting an education are not the same.

> cramming for 4 years.

That's not called cramming. It's called "learning". It means the test is working as intended.

That’s right, the average effect of test prep is around 0 increase.

You are greatly mistaken, although it does depend on the quality of the preparation.

I have seen scores improve 100-200 points per skill on average for middle range scores, and 50-100 points per skill for higher range scores with quality preparation.

Reasons:

- familiarity with test format

- improved test taking strategies

- familiarity with test content

- developing the mental stamina to perform at a high level throughout the relatively long test

- lowered anxiety and (often) increased confidence

Is this just personal anecdata?

An acquaintance of mine runs a high end SAT training program. He gets these results reliably for folks who have had little or no preparation before coming to him. Trained test takes is in the hundreds (maybe more).

Is this data or anecdata? You be the judge. He finds it easy to bank on professionally.

I encourage you to talk to someone who has worked at a high-end SAT training program (not Kaplan or that type). They can tell you the real deal, both successes and failures. Don’t rely on talking to the businesses themselves, because they will be selling their services rather than telling the complete truth (unless you know them personally).

Fwiw, failures are usually due to one of a few factors:

1. anxiety

2. learning blocks

3. physical issues (e.g., lack of sleep, sick, etc.).

The SAT goes from 200 - 800. If test prep raises average score by 100 points, there still is some room for the test to show actual knowledge.

The college board says that an SAT is better predictor of success in college than GPA, which based on my experience of American high schools makes sense. I get that wealth probably has a positive correlation to both. But it seems that should matter a little.

Why do you exclude learning the material as a reason? My test prep was largely a matter of learning material that I missed or wasn't taught effectively during school.

I would group that under familiarity with test content. Maybe an opaque label on my part.

although? Or the most important factor is, quality of prep. A man/women who have continuously, kept practicing to improve academically, becomes insignificant. However, keep throwing ball in hoop would help math and science innovations. This is absolutely insane.

>Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most.

Aren't colleges looking for people who will study the most? Who have the motivation and the ability for the motivation to translate into results?

Yes! That’s pretty much the point. The ACT and SAT are really good at finding some of those people but there’s a lot a lot a lot of type two errors. Letting people demonstrate their motivation in other ways and not immediately disqualifying them based on test scores goes a long way.

> Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most.

Dunno about you, but even if this is true, something that shows you were highly motivated and took time to do something seems very valuable if your goal is to produce people what produce.

In most areas of study, being motivated and investing time are key contributors to success. They aren't the only one. Intelligence, diversity of thought and resources matter too, but they certainly aren't negligible or dismissible.

My understanding is that SAT scores are significantly correlated with wealth (resources, time, externally imposed motivation), but not by as much as other admissions criteria, and that equity in educational attainment dramatically improved after standardized tests were introduced.

>improving the prestige of the college by admitting top athletes

What's the logic here? I'll admit I'm not a big fan of college sports myself, but who assesses the credibility of a college by their athletics program?

I think athletic success increases the awareness of the college among potential applicants, more people apply, the selectivity percentage goes down, the college looks more selective from a naive perspective used by college ranking formulas, its ranking increases, and thus its prestige increases.

It's a high-variance form of marketing.

I think it depends on the school how important this is, I kind of doubt Harvard needs to raise awareness. But there are other benefits of sports that will also depend on the particular school.

One factor that comes to mind is location- Notre Dame is in the middle of damn nowhere, if they did not have the appeal of the football team I think they would have a harder time attracting students to actually go there (regardless of name recognition).

It also will probably depend on how much the rich alums care about sports, so again for a school like Notre Dame that has always been big on sports and is also very big on legacies and promoting alum community and what not, it makes sense.

To be honest I don't see why it matters much for today's Harvard though, at least none of the benefits I can think of really line up. Plus Harvard can never attract the truly best athletes because no Ivy scholarships/the generally lower level of Ivy competition in most sports. Maybe they just care about being better than Yale.

Well, any student who's interested in playing sports at school will likely be interested in that sort of thing.

I think more generally it adds to the general culture of the school - people will pick up on the fact that some athlete they know went there and think that's cool, even if it doesnt impact their academics at all.

More cynically, lots of students love to associate their school's legacy with their own ego

In general, beating a rival and/or winning a league championship in a popular sport leads to higher alumni engagement. In addition to being good for the overall social health of the alumni community, it also leads to higher donations.

At Harvard specifically, beating Yale in football is a big deal within the community.

At large state schools, sports can function as an incredible arm of marketing. In addition to benefits for the alumni community and donations, it also can impact recruiting to undergraduate and graduate programs. Case in point, check out the change in the quality of the student body at the University of Alabama since Saban has been coaching the football team. It has improved not just the profile of the undergrad student body, but also the profile of the law school student body (among other grad schools, I’ve been told).

I will also add that being a varsity athlete puts the student in a totally-not-a-club club that makes a difference in certain social circles (especially in the northeast corridor).

The kind of upper-class people who actually run Harvard, and especially who run the feeder prep-schools for Harvard, have a really weird fixation on sports. Seriously.

Sport games form bonds, in other words they make networks.

They also bring back older graduates for a piece of nostalgia and bit of donation.

It's also about making lots of money, right? I don't blame the university, though. American culture obsesses over sports. In how many towns the biggest annual event would be the baseball game of the local high schools? In how many schools members in the school's sports team are like superstars? Still remember that Caltech was mocked because they finally won a collegiate basketball game in 37 years. It's still beyond me why basketball game matters at all for a college.

That sounds bad if you're a white non-rich kid.

Who cares about those? Definitely not the new American left.

Because it's definitely a zero-sum game.

The new American left does treat it as a zero sum game. That is why they focus on disparities instead of universal programs that would eliminate the largest absolute amounts of poverty and suffering.

What falls in the bucket of “universal programs”?

Basically, go check if Bernie Sanders supports it. If so, it's probably a universal program. Not a guarantee, but a very good heuristic.

Zero sum thinking is probably the most central tenet of the broader philosophy of the American left.

That's why there's so much talk of "disparity" or "inequality" vs. actual improvements to standards of living and quality of life. Almost all economic growth creates inequality for the simple reason that the more wealth there is, the more potential you have for skew.

In China, for instance, there was much less income inequality back in the 60's but I don't think too many folks want to go back to those days.

Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. To hear the new American left tell it though, we'd be better off all being equally poor instead of generally wealthier with a big differences between individual incomes.

40 years ago, if you looked at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality was "a rising tide floats all boats."

Today, if you look at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality is "rich get richer, poor get poorer."

Clearly, magic capitalism beans aren't the only ingredient in an economy that improves everyone's lot. My theory is that the other key ingredient is growth. Growth is chaotic and stirs money around, it's one of the precious few strong market forces that pushes towards equality rather than winner-take-all, even though it does so purely on entropic grounds and isn't strong enough to actually arrive anywhere near the maximum-entropy state.

Of course, once the growth stops, the market settles out again, and the real question is how to deal with that. "Try to stimulate growth at all costs" just creates bubbles. It's a tough question, but whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure it involves stirring money around, and I'm pretty sure big monied interests are going to fight it tooth and nail out of self-interest.

> Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life.

Your quality of life depends very much on how much other people make. It's all relative. If the average income in an area goes up by 50% but your own income only goes up 5%, then you are worse off than you started, because prices for everything will rise with the market. If you don't believe me, look at Bay Area housing. Inject a couple thousand new millionaires into an area and tell me things don't become worse for the existing modest-income people.

On a percentage basis, the world is zero sum. If someone else captures (or creates) an additional 1% of something, that comes at the expense of 1% collectively from everyone else.

> On a percentage basis, the world is zero sum

This is circular statement. Percentage is defined as a fraction of a some specified thing, so of course it's fixed. Ten percent of something is ten percent no matter how big or small that thing gets...

Anyway, I'm still not following your reasoning here. If you cut everyone's salaries where I work by 50% and only cut mine by 20%, that's still a bad day for me, even though I'm getting a bigger share of the total compensation paid out. People can argue about whether or not, or to what extent, wealth should be redistributed, but zero sum thinking is a bad path to go down and completely ignores humanity's ability to better its lot through innovation, trade, etc. It's a depressingly pessimistic worldview that prioritizes taking from others instead of creating things that others find valuable. At it's core it's a selfish ethos.

There isn't one American Left. The liberals do as you often say. The socialists often focus precisely on "universal programs that would eliminate the largest absolute amounts of poverty and suffering."

universal programs only eliminate the largest amounts of poverty and suffering if they are self sustaining long term. Any universal program that undermines the work that funds the universal programs in the first places is a threat to sustainability. The Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela and China under Mao are all examples of places that went with universal programs and policies that ultimately undermined the revenue streams supporting those programs.

In the context of Harvard's ~1,000 admissions a year, it's definitionally a zero-sum game.

Classism may not be quite as "trendy" as racism or sexism right this minute, but I think you'll still find plenty of interest in the topic (and it's intersections with the others) on the left.

>>I think you'll still find plenty of interest in the topic (and it's intersections with the others) on the left.

Please provide examples because I am not aware of any.

Interest in the topic is what drove the popularity around books like Hillbilly Elegy and tons to articles in NYT and WaPo after the 2016 election about poor white people and what were the challenges that they were facing and motivations.

You mean the ones which explained that the poor whites are actually privileged racists, who are too lazy to learn to code?

Ah yes, this is the level of insight in comments that I come to Hacker News for. Excellent work.

maybe the problem here is "american left" vs "other countries left".

In "other countries left" the left tag is defined by this topic (and this topic alone).

So, for someone not from america, your statement is a bit weird...

Yes, but people judge actions, not intentions.

There is a very great portion of the American left that cares about economic status. I do believe that admissions should factor in socioeconomic status rather than just race, gender, etc., but believing this does not require me to generalize a very wide reaching political stance.

It isn't generalizing a political stance, but summarizing the dominant narrative given to us by the media and what I call the new American left.

If the narrative was mostly about economic status, we would hear more about that and about universal programs. Rather than disparities and identity politics.

> If the narrative was mostly about economic status, we would hear more about that and about universal programs

Like.... Universal healthcare? One of the most (perhaps THE most) discussed topics at democratic presidential debates?

Just because neither Bernie nor Elizabeth Warren didn't win the nomination doesn't mean that their ideas aren't part of the left.

I thought Warren backed away from full Universal for all Health insurance. From my outside look, it didn’t appear as if Warren was actually that progressive. One random example — endorsing Biden (and Hillary which possibly is about identity politics) were both political moves not seeming to be of someone close to a progressive like Bernie.

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Many poorer people already get Medicaid which is quite good. If that was expanded a bit more to slightly higher incomes and [conservatives] states couldn’t deny so many people who should get it. That would be many times cheaper than Medicare for all. It would help the most marginalized.

Millions of people on good Medicaid right now could actually see their health insurance worsen under some universal health measures.

> I thought Warren backed away from full Universal for all Health insurance.

Her exact proposal was to phase-in full universal by starting with a subsidized public option and then spending more time building out a full universal plan, i believe.

You can argue this is a cop-out but i'd say it's more of a technocratic play - offering full universal would be a massive undertaking and not something that can just pop up overnight, but offering a subsidized insurance plan in the existing system is comparatively easier and could be implemented easily in a president's first year in office (with a cooperative congress, anyways)

Regardless, that's all aside the point

The "new American left" wants universal health care, college education, housing, and a clean environment. All of those issues affect lower-income whites just as much as any other racial group.

Universal college education is a huge disadvantage to lower-income people of all races and ethnicities, especially those in rural areas.

Wait.. what? Mind explaining this?

What's to explain? Universal college education cannot be done without tax increases, and increasing taxes on the rural working class to pay for a program that doesn't benefit them is a huge disadvantage to them.

If I'm a 21yo man in North Dakota working the oil fields to support my young family, how would you expect me to react to the idea of increasing my taxes so that white collar kids don't have to pay as much?

Well tax your rich and corporations more - education is singularly able to propel people out of poverty. For your tax increase you get a way out of poverty.

Tanstafl.

Frankly though- the American education problem is just people talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs at two degrees removed.

> education is singularly able to propel people out of poverty

You're using education in an ambiguous way here. Either you're including vocational training, in which case the argument for universal college doesn't follow, or you only mean college, in which case the premise is false.

Vocational training is way under-utilized and promoted in the US, but there are still many many jobs that won't even look at you without a degree in hand. As long as we're careful about where the money comes from, universal education can be a huge win for almost all citizens.

Nearly 2/3 of Americans don’t graduate college. There’s many reasons for that. Money is not the only reason nor likely the primary reason.

Free college education will not help the marginalized anywhere close to as it will others.

We essentially don’t even have free high school. If a teen has work a full time job or more while attending high school to support their family. That’s awful. That should be tackled before something as status quo as free college.

Is your claim that the "American Left" has decided to sacrifice the poor whites to help other races? If it is, it's not really an accurate claim. It's poor Asians who've taken the largest brunt of affirmative action, while Whites have remained relatively neutral in their standing.

It's probably both groups, asians and poor and middle class whites. If the winning narrative is racial diversity by proportion of population, you now find yourself largely in competition with people of your own race for one of the coveted spots, which means that the smart tactic is to find a way to exclude a subset of your own racial group that you're not part of so you have less competition.

Liberals making conservatives personas non-grata means they have half as many people to compete with for a coveted spot at the top of the pyramid of power.

I think it’s all Asians, not just poor. Now, it won’t matter and Asians will be eligible for only 5% of the pie.

Anyone poor won’t have the means to play the subjective system, and any left/liberal admin officer/provost in the Ivy’s knows that.

Champagne corks are flying tonight.

What exactly is the benefit of these exclusionary tactics in your opinion? If there is indeed some conspiracy over excluding certain groups what could the administrators possibly gain from conspiring like this?

Most rich people are white and most legacies are rich whites. More rich, more legacies, more donations, more buildings, more grants, more money for the polo team. More opportunites for you to mingle with rich folk, curry favors.

Rich whites were less threatened when they could game the system, but once Asian Americans began to become overly represented per capita academically and Affirmative Action lawsuits on descrimination against Asians began working up the courts... problem solved now.

There’s no outright conspiracy, these people know their position and what’s best for them. They’re probably not bad people but they’re not going to give away what they’ve got.

Makes sense.

How would you change the incentives to make what you described less viable?

I think SAT/ACT/AP scores took power away from provosts/admins and there was some accomadation to meritocracy. Underprivileged had a chance, but it was a long shot.

It’s too many trying to get into too few colleges. We need more, smaller universities. Federal funds/grants should be reoriented away from the Ivies. Zero Federal funds for schools that don’t have lower than 30:1 class sizes. That would stop admin bloat overnight.

The Musks, Gates and Bezos’ of the world should be building new colleges, not dumping more into the olds.

That would also kill schools that are in places with few resources.

Ivies don’t need fed funds - they play a different game since the underlying markets tend to be asymptotic - the upper end of students, the upper end of professors, the upper end of athletes, the upper end of wealthy legacies.

“the average amount of money that the eight Ivy League schools received annually over that time period — $4.31 billion — exceeds the amount of money received by 16 of the 50 states.”

Fund those with few resources or create new ones away from the Ivies. You can’t democratize the Ivies but you can give a lot more people a better education. The status quo is that the Ivies have their cake and eat it too.

https://www.thedp.com/article/2017/04/ivy-league-tax-report

That sounded weasel wordy so I read the article -

> full $41.59 billion of the Ivy League’s money could be traced back to taxpayer-funded payments and benefits.

Traces back.

So part of it is tax breaks to educational institutions- which is natural, they have the biggest endowments combined so the tax benefits will be massive.

They point out that major research happens at these institutions so they have more money from that as well.

This meshes less with the “have their cake and eat it too” line of thinking and more a result of the distortions from reputation and network effects.

Your comment is a non-sequitur, and that non-sequitur is emblematic of exactly the problem everyone else in this thread is discussing.

How well "Whites" as a group are doing says nothing about "poor whites" and how they're doing. It's a fallacy of division, and anyway you shouldn't pre-judge things about people based on race... it's literally racial prejudice.

> How well "Whites" as a group are doing says nothing about "poor whites" and how they're doing.

How so? "Poor whites" are just a subset of "whites". The parent comment claimed that "poor whites" are worse off. This is making 2 claims: that they are worse off because they are poor, and that they are worse off because they are white. I'm not denying that they're worse off because they're poor, that should be fairly obvious to anyone that knows anything about the American university admissions system. But the parent added the extra claim about race, and I'm refuting that for being inaccurate.

> and anyway you shouldn't pre-judge things about people based on race... it's literally racial prejudice.

Where in my comment did I make any racially prejudiced or racially divisive statements? The parent comment was the one that decided to divide the group of poor further by race.

Anyway, it's Harvard (and the other Ivy Leagues) that are pre-judging people by race. Is me discussing that fact somehow also "prejudging by race" and "racial prejudice"? I don't follow what you're trying to imply.

Edit: Looks like I confused the parent comment with the grandparent comment. The parent comment was about the "left" not caring about poor white kids. I think most of what I'm saying still applies, just replace "worse off" with "not cared about by the left". Ie. The left doesn't care about the poor too much, but they're definitely neutral towards whites, if not biased in favour.

> How so? "Poor whites" are just a subset of "whites".

"A fallacy of division is the error in logic that occurs when one reasons that something that is true for a whole must also be true of all or some of its parts."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division

Also a PoC non-rich kid. My wife's students in an inner-city school serving a mostly immigrant populace are not going to write fine-sounding essays about their time volunteering in Haiti, because they're working at Starbucks instead of volunteering in Haiti. Hell, their parents came from Haiti.

The high school I went to, one of the two towns is regularly in one of those big magazines too 50 most affluent/best zip codes. I don’t know any one off the top of my head bedsides 2 possible people who did any thing like that in HS.

Yes, vast majority did not have to work while going to HS (which is possibly why some angles toward free HS should be focused on. Not free college). But they also weren’t freely going to Haiti.

I think the data shows that the effect of affirmative action (or "holistic admission") is actually relatively neutral for white kids. For example, Asians need a much higher SAT score than Whites to get into most Ivy League schools. Not sure I understand the logic behind it, but that's how it is.

That's a valid point, and a though one. But without affirmative action policies we may never be able to change the status quo and promote social inclusion. The challenge is making sure these actions don't create new social gaps.

Couldn't have said it better.

> Of course colleges do all these things already

That's an important thing to keep in mind. Particularly with the more elite schools, the goal isn't to educate as many people as possible, but to keep their inflated prestige through artificial scarcity. The Harvard Extension School is a great example of this - they have tens of thousands of students and advertise themselves as giving students a true Harvard education taught by Harvard educators, but the students aren't "official" Harvard graduates because the institution wants to keep that number artificially low and selective.

edX is another good example - sure, we'll give you the opportunity to learn these things, we'll even offer to assess you and give you a certificate, but we're not going to use technology to really open up the education system.

These institutions will pay lip service towards increasing underrepresented demographics (including racial and economic), but they're never going to embrace truly substantive solutions because they desperately want to keep the education credentials scarce.

Harvard will use family donations and legacy (siblings, parents and grand parents who were alums) as replacement signals. It can't hurt to know some faculty personally via family connections too, and get them to send a letter of recommendation.

Dumb question, but are GPAs useless? I mean a plot of say high school GPA vs say college graduation rate or college GPA would be rather informative.

They're not useless, but it's rather that when everyone's scoring high, it's not the best measure to differentiate candidates.

What happens in other countries, where they only use grades/GPA, is that you start using more decimals - but then again, that's only useful when the size/population of "perfect" scores is low enough.

If you have 10000 students with a perfect 4.0, and 2000 spots, then it's obviously impossible to just use grades - so it kinda loses its function for selection.

Ok, so you think that say some state schools it might work ok, but not at say Stanford or Harvard. What about say folding in AP exam scores?

If they're not gonna use tests as a measure, then it's probably gonna fall more on interviews / motivational letters / extracurricular activities.

Again, when you have so and so many perfect students, you need to use other features - otherwise you might as well draw random names out of a hat.

These schools (Ivy Leagues, Stanford, etc.) first and foremost want the students that are most likely to succeed at their schools. They know fully well that there are far more good students (on paper) than spots, but they also know that two 4.0 students are not alike. Some will fail, no mater how good they are in HS.

Not every school has AP classes. In fact there's a direct correlation with AP classes existing in schools in neighborhoods where income is higher.

This is why MIT got rid of considering Subject II tests because even on top of already relatively wealthy select schools that offer AP classes only a select few of those offer classes that prep you for subject II test.

It's essentially exponentiating the amount of opportunities rich kids have to slice themselves within percents different from other rich kids at their school but overall entirely leaves behind students who weren't lucky enough to born in a neighborhood with a tax bracket that determines the schools funding.

High Schools are on the student’s side when it comes to college admissions. So when you’re on the honors track of your HS you almost literally can’t fail because your HS is trying to get you into better schools. Your HS is playing the game with you.

The secret of being an honors kid isn’t aptitude but being told that you’re smart and your parents/peers expecting it of you.

> The secret of being an honors kid isn’t aptitude but being told that you’re smart and your parents/peers expecting it of you.

This condescension isn't even based on fact. I was in some honors classes but not in others and for the classes I was in an honors class, I had more aptitude than my peers. For those in the classes I was not in, those peers had more aptitude than me (probably more motivation too since it was for subjects I didn't care for like English Literature)

I mean I don’t think it’s condescending. I was the “smart kid” at my HS. People on the honors track weren’t any smarter than the rest, we just cared a lot more about our grades and looking good for colleges.

The “low performers” during HS, now that they’re unburdened by a stifling institution, are showing that they’re just as smart and talented but in areas that school didn’t bring out. One is a pastry chef, quite a few are artists and graphic designers, one is a copyrighter, one does industrial design, two are in theater now.

They could have done just fine in maths and physics but they, rightfully, didn’t really care.

> The secret of being an honors kid isn’t aptitude but being told that you’re smart and your parents/peers expecting it of you.

How much teaching experience do you have? I'm including any time you tried to convey a skill to any other person.

Sure! I tutored the majority of my classmates in Calc and Physics and I did not find one person I believed couldn’t do it. I did find a lot of people who believed they couldn’t do it, weren’t good at math, and wanted to give up though.

Some of the main problems:

* A lot more people than you would expect have attention issues and just needed someone to give them one-on-one attention. They would get distracted in class for a minute and then be lost for the rest of the lecture. I got permission from our teacher to record the lectures and then had people work through them with the advantage of a pause and rewind button.

* Some people were really independent and our textbooks were utter trash. I brought them “more advanced” books like Spivak ayyy that didn’t treat the reader as an idiot too stupid for a rigorous explanation. Having someone not “teach down” to them opened up so much. Easiest tutoring sessions ever when they just needed some quiet space to read. It’s amazing how much lack of understanding comes from years of teachers treating them as stupid and trying to have them memorize shortcuts that convey no understanding and don’t generalize.

* A few people were very tactile and so I brought in my laptop with Mathematica and had a bunch of examples coded up and let them play with the sliders. So many people groked limits and integrals with this.

* Some people needed more or less abstraction. Symbol overload is real. I loved saying something like “and this is true for any 17.” Connecting problems to “real life” wasn’t as effective as I had hoped but putting numbers in or having a variable cheat sheet they could quickly reference the meaning / value worked great!

* Some people learn by machine learning. They need a bunch of problems to work algorithmicly to feel the pattens. I called them numeric tactile. Once they’ve done it 50 times or so they’re ready to hear the abstract explanation because they’ve oriented themselves.

* A lot of people struggled because HS has so little focus on rote memorization. People didn’t have the toolbox of identities and little tricks at the forefront of their minds but some flashcards and cheat sheets fixed that right quick. I had like 5 people suddenly get trig identities once I made them memorize a few of the core ones. Constantly asking them to repeat something back to me whenever it came up was way more effective than I thought.

As you can clearly see I didn’t have much of a social life in HS.

Your calculus and physics classmates are not a representative sample of people.

Sure, but I don't have any prior belief that my classmates -- kids around my age in my area which was lower-middle to upper-middle class depending on the neighborhood at a middling school -- skewed more proficient in math than the general population.

Of course it's not representative but I find it hard to believe that some no name school happened to be where the math nerds all hung out.

The population of students taking calculus in high school is already skewed more proficient than the general population just by that fact. (Obviously, the causality runs in the other direction, but the skew is there.)

Replying separately to the tutoring anecdotes, you reminded me of someone I tutored who was having trouble learning the chain rule. He got it after going through (with supervision) a single example I assigned - calculate the derivative of sin(sin(sin(sin(sin(x))))). At which point he rather angrily exclaimed "why isn't that example in the book?!"

I'm not quite sure what the connection is, but the combination of

> Easiest tutoring sessions ever when they just needed some quiet space to read.

> A lot of people struggled because HS has so little focus on rote memorization.

brought it back.

Universities can adjust for grade inflation. For example, a Waterloo, the Engineering admissions department compares high school averages to first year averages to see how much scores drop, and use that to compute an adjustment factor by school (the logic being that if your marks dropped more than average, then your school was probably inflating your mark from the "true" mark you deserved).

> I mean a plot of say high school GPA vs say college graduation rate or college GPA would be rather informative.

You'd have to be very careful in how to measure both the inputs and the outputs.

First, "weighting" makes high school GPAs pretty difficult to interpret without a lot of context. This is compounded by the fact that "weighting" is a bad solution to the underlying problem of trying to compare fundamentally incomparable coursework. There's really no numerical way to compare a grade in a remedial Biology course to a grade in an AP Biology course.

Second, grading varies wildly from school to school and teacher to teacher, and what an "A" means will also vary wildly. Some teachers emphasize understanding, some emphasize busy work, and some hand of "A"s like candy. To give one example that might be useful to the HN audience: I've volunteered in several AP CS courses:

- In one course, getting an "A" required writing thousands upon thousands of lines of if-else conditions following inane string formatting guidelines. Barely any looping. AFAICT the teacher was the least competent math teacher that was removed from teaching any math courses that were tested for in state standardized tests (never taught algebra or geometry -- just all the random remedial courses and electives).

- In another course, getting an "A" required writing real programs, using some data structures appropriately, knowing the difference between constant/linear/"not linear" algorithm, etc. Students even wrote some simple proofs. Teacher was a CS major.

- In a third course, basically everyone got in "A". Teacher was, I shit you not, a gym teacher. Literally a warm body. Course was basically self-study on days I wasn't there.

So, even in relatively "standardized" AP courses, there's often not a nice bell curve, teachers aren't using the same rubrics or even assignments, and you really have no clue whether that grading reflects ability to put up with bullshit busywork or actual understanding.

Third, you also have to be careful about how you're measuring the results. College GPA and graduation rates are not field-agnostic. A 4.0 in CS or Physics or Math is not easily comparable to a 4.0 in Communications. Also, universities aren't comparable. A degree/GPA at Small Noncompetitive Liberal Arts College is simply not comparable to a degree/GPA at MIT or Stanford.

Also, dropping your lucrative major for a useless major can have an even bigger impact on your life than dropping out. The number of people who start in STEM and end up with a Communications or Business degree is just as relevant, or arguably even more relevant, than the number of Communications or Business majors who end up without a degree.

These are all excellent points! But, I think this is the discussion we should be having. I doubt we can get the data, but universities have data on both the performance of students they have admitted (along with their schools) as well as their performance at the university. It seems like they could do their own analysis.

You mentioned the question of what the A means. I wonder if just the act of working to get the A tells us something and that something may be more predictive of college success than the SAT/ACT.

Or, another thing to imagine looking at would be say AP exam scores. I am biased, but I would imagine these would be more predictive than SAT/ACT and probably more informative than GPA.

The question of change in major is interesting--but I think even the coarse question of say graduates/doesn't graduate would be interesting to see how it correlates with high school GPA (as compared to SAT/ACT) before delving into the more difficult cases that you rase.

No. Empirically, they're as predictive as or more predictive of future educational performance (usually first-year college GPA) than test scores, despite grade inflation (which isn't as extreme as some would have you think).

The advantage of GPA is it's an average over a long time period, unlike a test, which is a slice at a very brief moment. The disadvantage of GPA is variability in course difficulty and grading standards.

What's interesting to think about is how variable grades and courses really are across institutions. For example, colleges do try to coordinate content a bit because of transfer issues etc.

> [GPAs a]re as predictive as or more predictive of future educational performance (usually first-year college GPA) than test scores, despite grade inflation (which isn't as extreme as some would have you think).

But in the context of this finding, the returns to grade inflation are limited by the fact that, when you report your GPA, you also report a standardized test score. This theoretically nullifies any potential benefit to grade inflation. (In practice, there's still a benefit.)

When there is no outside check on the reliability of GPAs, might they adjust by inflating a lot more than they already have?

They can be gamed too easily. My high school gave a 1 point bonus for AP courses. It it fair to compare someone with a 4.2 against students without that opportunity?

Yeah, also private schools make a business out of their college admissions profile, I am sure as this becomes the norm they will inflate grades even more.

I do think along with the application the school is supposed to submit a profile of the classes they offer and the average grades at the school and whatnot, but I do wonder how much admissions committees actually look closely at this. It's also hard to penalize a student for having all As, because maybe they did deserve them!

I think we are going to end up having even more emphasis on legit extracurriculars, at least for the average middle class student.

Colleges can look at both weighted and unweighted GPA.

My viewpoint: GPAs are not useless. They are a good prediction of studying, learning and seriousness in those. But definitely not entirely predictive. May be less weightage to overall GPAs and more to final year GPAs(considering difficulty of courses).

(Disclaimer; I only read the non-paywalled preview).

The argument is that the SAT/ACT is uniquely broken this year; including in the ability of applicants to take the test. Even among the people who did take the test; circumstances are so weird this year that it would be difficult to interpret the results based on historic data; and the results would be relatively meaningless for future data.

With GPA, you can still see the pre-crisis grades of the students; as well as the historic performance of the school that provided those grades. These are signals that can be calibrated against historic data; and which admissions likely already uses.

So I generally agree with you, and have agreed with the position you're outlining, but my thoughts about this have changed over time, having been on graduate admissions committees and doing research on related topics. The admissions committees I've been on have had these discussions about dropping standardized tests; so far they weren't but this sort of trend might put pressure to do so.

The thing about this, loosely speaking, is that there's bias and variance. The issue with tests is that there's huge variance in them. Out of your life, how much time is spent actually taking it? With the GRE or SAT you're talking a few hours at most; the same thing could be said of most standardized tests.

The problem with this is that now you don't just have bias, you have this huge error/noise/variance associated with the test score. Maybe you don't take tests as well as the person sitting next to you. Maybe there was something weird the day and time you took the test, but it wasn't enough to declare the test invalid because of financial incentives. Maybe it makes assumptions, like that everyone taking the test comes from a common educational background, that are irrelevant to the actual thing the test is measuring. Etc etc. So yes, it predicts things, but if you look at studies, it does so relatively weakly in the grand scheme of things, and even more weakly with reference to even longer-term variables past first-year GPA.

The issue is that yes, the SAT, GRE etc is providing some information. I agree that ideally it shouldn't be thrown away. But today you have this opposite extreme in many cases where it's taken very much at face value, as an error-free quantity, or only minimally so. It's difficult to do anything with. Let's say you have someone apply. They're Asian, or white, or black, or whatever. Their test score is relatively low, but they have incredible background, GPA, etc. How do you interpret that individual test score in that context? The appropriate thing to do is to treat it as one bit of information, so that if everything were uncompetitive, it would support that, and if everything were competitive, it would support that, but in the scenario described it's kind of off. If you ignore it though, do you really need the test? If you blindly let the test overrule other things, is that appropriate?

Tests I think have become a kind of liability, in that they are useful, but their use is superceded by their misuse. There's always this one person or group who argues that the test score should supercede other bits of information because it's "more objective" ignoring all of its noise. It's almost like information that becomes dangerous because how it's leveraged by admissions committees, politicians, etc. in a way that far exceeds its validity. It's like having a tool that people can't use correctly on average -- if some product were on the market that led to lots of problems because people were misusing it, you might say the tool isn't the problem, people are, but if people were misusing it that much, you might still take it off the market because that's still critical.

I feel like there's a lot of this -- it's not just tests -- where a lot about a person gets reduced to a single number, or a couple of numbers, that are treated as fixed properties of that person, which is not true. A number may be more objective, but if its meaning is hazy enough, the objectivity doesn't matter.

This all may be moot, because I suspect a lot of this is just due to coronavirus-specific issues and tests will get readopted later. But I could be wrong.

Thanks for the excellent response! I have looked at this in the context of physics GREs and it doesn't seem to be terribly predictive--but I think that graduate admissions probably has fewer candidates than undergraduate admissions. So, is there time/resources for more holistic admission at the undergraduate level (at least for the first pass)?

Harvard's reason for doing this is the coronavirus pandemic, standardized testing may skew more heavily towards the rich than usual. They would have better access to extended home schooling during the lockdown, are less at risk for getting ill, and the ongoing financial issues wouldn't hamper their preparation.

I don't know why everyone else seems to be talking long term reasons, but both options seem pretty bad.

I get what you're saying but A) I don't see how they can bring them back after this and B) doesn't the same argument about other application dimensions just extend to the effects of coronavirus? I would imagine richer students are also completing more coursework (possibly paying for online college courses), are more able to find alternative extracurriculars, etc.

The SAT actually seems easier to keep somewhat level during this time to me, as long as admissions counselors have some recognition of the drawbacks.

I also wonder about the distinction between "not required" versus "not considered". It becomes a weird mental game if submission is still considered just not required.

>) I don't see how they can bring them back after this

What difficulty is there? As they've announced it's removed due to events this year, I honestly can't guess.

On B, I said it skews more towards the rich this year. Most years everyone at least has their school day.

If it is not required, it just becomes extracurricular. If it's not considered it's useless.

I think it isn't really comparable to an extracurricular, especially not if similar schools continue to require it. It would basically be an extracurricular that you know everyone has but only some people are choosing to report it. That just seems like something that could subconsciously affect judgement even if admissions tries to be agnostic.

The reason many colleges are changing it to "not required" is because so many students are unable to take the test this year.

Something that is not required but still considered is beyond the curriculum, or extracurricular. Many colleges have allowed you to submit both the SAT and ACT, admissions uses all the data available and the student should present themselves as best they truthfully can.

My Latin American State university had a nice solution: a 1 year long introductory course open to everyone which you had to pass to formally enter the university, similar to a centrally-administered course on SAT exams.

The system ticked most boxes: poor students had a lot more resources to study and pass the exams, and the evaluation was very correlated to how well you would do in the University compared to doing than a single exam. It also served as a nice introduction of how to properly navigate a University environment.

When I did this course I wasn't happy in spending an extra year studying before starting university, but in retrospect this is a better system than anything else I've seen. Additionally, almost failing one of the maths courses was a wake-up call that made me realise that I couldn't just wing exams like I did during High School

Which country?, it sounds like a good idea.

my cousin "volunteered" at her dad's hospital to get into harvard( which she did). Now she is doctor. I know for a fact that she had zero passion to be doctor, hated being in the medical school and hates her work.

Hard not be cynical and hate the institutions when witness stuff like this.

This is sad. I had a girlfriend 10 years ago who was studying to become a nurse. She was fantastic at passing tests (rote memorization) and did not care a yota for the science behind it nor had any compassion for people. I had no idea what key answer banks were before she told me how she studies. Shes a nurse now and does it solely for the good money. It’s sad that jobs that require compassion are assailed by motivated test takers. For all she cared she would pursue anything that would make her money and nursing was a low hanging fruit. Now 10 years later the competition in nursing is even more intense and good test takers have a clear advantage.

You give every new born a random number. If their number % 10 == 3 they go to college. The end. Will that work?

My theory is that those kids don't do better than other kids.

The logic is they want to be less transparent because they have to find room for ever more legacy and donor-based admissions.

This will presumably be a lot easier to do without having to maintain a false sense of propriety in admissions.

The good thing is that, at least in my experience watching the online course presentations, Harvard profs are exceptionally good at explaining course material. I had one prof in my entire college experience who could explain the class material he was teaching as well as the average Harvard prof.

You've obviously never been to a private boarding school where tuition is $40k/year in highschool and in addition to this their parents paid for $5000 classes where the teachers helped them create calculator programs on SAT approved calculators to help solve problems faster and do timed exam grades.

I grew up on welfare until middle school years, made straight A's in a poorly ranked public school applied to every boarding school on the east coast because where I come from those schools are legitmately better (unlike in the northeast where many public schools are legit and fostered by small towns full of rich white people who drive to Manhattan for work everyday) and while I appreciate the people who paid for me to go to boarding school, I still got rejected from a Stanford summer school robotics program despite being qualified because I couldn't pay $10k in cash for it while a peer of mine driving a Porsche to school complained his parents were forcing him to go.

I still couldn't afford the SAT classes many of my peers took after school on campus so while yes my life is measurably better and you are correct money helps pad resumes outside of GPA, you are also incorrect it doesn't also help pad SAT scores.

This has been proven time and time again like a few years ago when sailing terminology was removed from reading comprehension because it was supposed to be derived from the context. Most kids who grew up in the Bronx don't have context for sailing terminology regardless of how well read they might be. This is just one example of money aside, how it is false to believe the tests are any less biased inducing than anything else that might go into a students application.

Talking about the Oarsman-regatta thing? That was 2 decades ago...

No.

https://www.clearchoiceprep.com/sat-act-prep-blog/the-most-i...

What are you saying "No" to? This article says it may have been from the 80s?

I guess I'm saying no to your attempt to distract from the fact that you can pay alot of money to pass these tests in addition to not having proof there is esoteric terminology people growing up on poverty despite being good students might not be exposed to.

This would be obvious to you if you've ever taken the SATs.

What point are you trying to make? You should make it. Right now you are knitpicking. Even if you are right only it was that one instance it sets precedent for economic power structures graduating students inherit in the workforce for years to come.

I just don't understand your prioritization of feedback which seems to be entirely focused on distracting from the comment.

The test has actually changed over the years and since people made a stink about the oarsman question, they’ve been more careful to reduce cultural bias (though I’m not convinced it was ever that bad in the first place). It is basically a canard at this point.

Isn’t the process already opaque? They already claim to take many factors into account.

I highly recommend watching the video by Scott Galloway on The College Implosion. [1]

"Colleges have become luxury brands and are adopting a strategy of artificial scarcity to create irrational margins"

There's a large movement right now where many are saying the large tuition fees for Zoom lectures aren't worth it.

Colleges sell themselves for the experience and are a luxury lifestyle brand almost, but with covid the lifestyle aspect of it is wiped out, so its reasonable that students are asking why they'd pay such high premiums.

I think removing SAT, ACT casts a wider net and hopefully allows more students to enroll, what's the scaling limitation if everyone's doing lectures on Zoom? Presumably everyone's also getting graded electronically in some way.

[1]: https://youtu.be/d8kwzSTITP0

I don't get it, aren't most colleges non-profits? Why do they seek such high tuition fees if they're not profiting? Or are they, somehow?

They are non-profit, but bureaucracy begets bureaucracy. The growth in higher education from raised tuition partly goes towards better facilities, but most of the money is going towards administration. That, plus a competitive environment, has almost makes a zero sum game where colleges offer more services to attract a dwindling pool of full-pay students.

Incentives are a lot more complicated than simply being non-profit = altruistic mission optimizing. The president makes a million bucks a year. Faculty pursue status, power, and resources for research or personal interest. Alumni often wish to keep their institution exclusive and elite to increase the value of their degree and average member of their community, and provide resources to their institutions (Donations) as a means of control over “mission”.

Of course, that’s all on the pretty cynical side and the majority of people I think are overall aligned with the mission of providing the best possible education and research environments. But, the above is where Scott is coming from, and certainly holds some water. Particularly in his area of academia ahem business schools ahem.

"Nonprofit" is a tax designation in the U.S. There is nothing in that designation which prevents those running the nonprofit from personally profiting greatly from their positions. There are limitations in the methods to gain such personal profit, but they far from forestall it. Wikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit_organization_laws_i....

I haven't read the link but I assume it means something like: The institutions do not have ownable shares that can be traded, and so ownership of the institution itself is not a profit-seeking endeavor (is it even "owned" at all?), but salaries are uncapped and so being employed by it can be?

There's more nuance to it but those are the basics.

Mind you, there are extra book-keeping rules. For instance, the highest salaries at an institution (and I believe salaries over a certain amount) and who is making them must be publicly disclosed.

Not to mention Harvard has a $40 billion endowment on top of that.

At the end of the day, it's a way to not pay taxes.

Stakeholders are still getting paid in different ways: high salaries and job security, "administrator" jobs that shouldn't exist.

In other words, it's socialism.

"Non-profit" doesn't mean you don't make any money, it means you spend all your money. I went to a tiny liberal arts college you've never heard of, with a 1300-student enrollment today. The president makes well over half a million dollars a year. There are half a dozen deans making anywhere from $75-250k. A career services department run by a six-figure employee who has never held a job outside of that college (for real). They're technically a non-profit but with a sticker price of $40k a year and actual per-capita revenue somewhere in the high $20's, that is a lot of money to spread around to administration while you have 150-person lectures taught by a $25k/yr adjunct.

Is this RPI?

No but I've actually heard very similar experience to folks that went there, although I don't think it qualifies as a liberal arts college.

Perhaps you've heard the old quip about colleges with large endowments: a college is hedge fund with a small teaching arm attached to get the non-profit designation.

You don’t want to appear less premium. Hyundai increased their prices to make the Genesis seem like a luxury brand. It worked, their sales went up.

I hate the hand-waviness behind this argument. Yes, much of college is not worth it anymore and can be attained online. Still, these HN threads always come to the same conclusion that there remain elements of the college experience that can only be found on campus.

Not attacking you personally btw. You seem to see the nuance required of the conversation.

> Still, these HN threads always come to the same conclusion that there remain elements of the college experience that can only be found on campus.

In my view the college experience (societies, living away from home, mixing with people from outside your local area) is far more useful than the actual teaching. "There's a time and a place for everything - and it's called college".

However with covid, all that is removed, and you're left with some lectures (which in normal times you can't pause or rewind, and may well be at terrible times of the day), and an occasional chat with a bored professor.

>However with covid, all that is removed,

It's very unlikely that this lasts more than another semester or so though. If you're looking to enroll in the fall or the next year, it shouldn't be a big concern.

If I were supposed to be starting in October 2020, I'd certainly skip next year and have a gap year

2021 onwards sure, things will be back to normal

I'd like to see your sources on that.

"A semester or so" reasonably covers until September 2021. I can't see the world standing for social distancing that long, and as such covid will spread throughout the population just like Polio, TB and uncurable/vaccinable diseases of the past. IFR of covid for undergrads is about 0.002-0.005%, so 1 in 20k-50k.

Chance of death for a 20 year old in the UK is about 1 in 4k, so you're 5-10 times more likely to die for some other reason than covid.

Indeed by moving away from home you're less likely to infect older parents, so it's a rational call.

There are multiple vaccine candidates that have passed phase I trials, have demonstrated they produce antibodies in humans, and have demonstrated they are successful in animal challenge trials. The chance's are good that we have a working vaccine by end of year, and the chances are very good that we have one sometime next year.

In the unlikely event it turns out that we can't develop a vaccine in the near future, we'll have to just deal with the disease long term. If we try to keep the world economy shut down for more than a few months at a time, we'll kill more people than COVID would. And as other people have pointed out, college students are very low risk.

A friend of mine goes to Harvard. He says once you get into Harvard... it's smooth sailing from there.

I have heard the same thing about universities in Japan. High school in Japan is so much pressure that some students crack under it, but then once you get to university it is supposedly easily to just slack off for your entire degree program.

Do employers care about what grades you got in university?

No one has ever hired me based on my college grades. The first job I had checked to see I graduated from college. Every other job has been based on experience and my record of performance.

I've had it this happen. It was a startup that was ran and helmed by mostly people from academia. These people have never been outside of academia so that might have influenced there decision to check my grades.

It can be if you want it to. At Harvard, there's very few requirements on what courses constitute a degree, so if you want to get a degree by just taking the easiest classes possible, you can definitely do that. Of course, most students don't do that since that's not why they went there. I do think professors try to give higher grade averages for the harder classes to avoid punishing students for challenging themselves, but I don't really have a problem with that (if you chose those classes you're probably not in it for the grades anyway). Also, at least I'm the sciences, a good fraction of students start taking classes at the graduate level either freshman or sophomore year, since they'll have completed a good chunk of the undergrad curriculum in high school.

And then there's MIT.

IHTFP is love, IHTFP is life...

I think we should just roll some kind of standardized test into your Junior year. Instead of it being this external expensive thing, everyone who wants to go to college can just take a half year preparation course in your Junior year and take the test at the end. We don't need this to be external. We already do a lot of standardized tests to measure student performance. This fixes the GPA problem between schools and the uncomparability of those numbers.

The issue with standardized testing that's just rolled into coursework is that it'll further incentivize teachers to teach to the test. In my opinion it could also disadvantage schools which don't have education in the highest of mind. Basically running as a daycare center in some sections.

Most high school students take the SAT/ACT in their junior year already. Many only take the test that once.

Many high schools have test-taking built into the curriculum for the first half of that year of school.

Some states have replaced their standardized testing with the SAT/ACT.

What states are those? No schools that I know of locally have SAT prep as a school course or use the SAT as their standardized tests. It is good that some schools are already moving this way. I think it makes sense to have just one standardized test that can be used for admission and also tracking progress of schools and states.

The last I knew:

SAT: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia.

ACT: Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

Also, the implementation of SAT prep is spotty at best. As with most things, whether the schools have test prep is pretty reliant on how well funded the individual district is. At least that's my experience.

One of the drivers for Colorado moving to the SAT from the ACT was the amount of free SAT prep courses online. SAT partnered with Khan Academy to offer a lot of test prep and practice tests online for free.

Illinois was the same way. ACT charges for every damned thing, whereas SAT is free. That's one good thing, at least.

In Colorado all high school Juniors take the SAT in April for free. I think they have to pay to add the writing section but most universities have removed the writing requirement.

Anyone intimate with Germany's vocational training system, that's used as an alternative to college by approximately half of all graduating high school students?

2-3 years small salary vocational training straight out of HS at 1 of 400k participating companies in 1 of 400 role types.

I want to know why implementing this isn't a national debate in US, it seems like such an obviously good idea.

I'd bet a large part of the reason is cultural. For just about any American high school student who's been exposed to the mainstream culture their entire lives (including myself at the time), the idea of missing out on the "college experience" (i.e. mostly partying) that just about every conventionally successful person they've ever met will have gone through and instead going to "small salary vocational training" would just be completely unthinkable and depressing to imagine, especially if all your friends are following the usual path. I suppose it's possible this may change with Covid-19 but I still don't quite see it.

Edit: could any of the downvoters explain their reasoning? I guess this could have come off as facetious because I mentioned partying or something, but I'm completely serious -- why wouldn't cultural reasons be a major factor?

American culture also devalues community college in this way.

The way we break this is by changing our hiring decisions. If you have a Harvard grad (or other private university grad) in front of you, consider if they really are the right candidate. Consider recruiting from local community and public colleges, including public non-traditional colleges. Build a rapport with the job placement offices at these schools. If candidates are missing something, work with the schools to improve their curricula.

Is there any difference in hiring between someone who attended four years at a college vs transferred in after two years at community college? (At UC Berkeley, about a third of graduates are transfers and at least while I was a student there I didn't get any perception they were less capable)

I expect any differences to manifest in the student's life over the subsequent years. Many people build a significant chunk of their social network in those first two years of undergraduate college

>Build a rapport with the job placement offices at these schools.

This is 100% the right answer. Source: my career in higher education has been mostly at the community college level.

Universities and 4-year colleges are not as incentivized as community colleges to build career pathways and make direct changes to curriculum based on external input. Most community colleges (I'm betting all of them, but I can't say that for sure) have committees of business leaders to inform curriculum decisions. Community colleges are also more nimble when it comes to creating degree pathways - therefore, if the graduates do not have the skills they need for your business, they can spin up a new degree in less than a year, fully accredited, while universities may take 3-5 years.

Further, businesses can impact individual class curriculum at a community college via these advisory committees. This just simply does not happen at a university.

This is pure conjecture. The younger generation currently consumes way less alcohol and is overall much more studious and serious than previous generations. Years of austerity have eroded the "animal house" culture you are picturing from your youth.

They are pushing college WAY less and pushing vocational training WAY MORE. I've had my younger cousins reach out to me interested in vocational training and my opinions on that. ( My opinion? Pick a major with a career. Do two years of community college, finish up at a major university. Vocational jobs are well paying and are perfectly respectable, but tend to be pretty hard. )

Interesting. Thanks for making an actual counter-argument. I have to admit I have a little trouble believing the cultural connotations around college could have changed that much in the time since I graduated from HS (2007), but I'll take your word for it -- I don't have any current connections to kids that age myself.

I graduated around the same time. We got burned BADLY and I think people started paying attention around that time.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of the 40% of graduating high schoolers in the US who don't go to college. It would seem nice to have an option to graduate and start a career.

>I want to know why implementing this isn't a national debate in US, it seems like such an obviously good idea.

Because it would involve respecting blue-collar workers, and beating up on Labor(TM) (really: wage suppression for the working class) takes priority in America over doing what's economically and socially rational.

Most of those who go for vocational training don't have a "high-school degree" in the sense of 12 or more years of schooling. They may leave one of several types of secondary school with a degree after 10 years or even less. I believe the American term for someone like that is "high-school dropout". So a better analogy might be "The majority of German high-school dropouts spend 2-3 years as small-salary interns before they can get a real job."

Surely manual workers in the US are already learning to do their jobs somehow. What makes you think the German system would be an improvement?

Because from my limited understanding, it allowed them to easily participate in further vocational training to become well paid specialists or leaders. In addition, the support system was such that there were numerous opportunities across the Mittelstand, whereas in the USA is easy for dropouts to be stuck flipping burgers long term without support or guidance to turn their job as fry lord into a career or job that is more...sustainable.

Not all of those apprenticeships are high level ones and I suspect there is much less possibility of starting as an apprentice and going all the way to a degree as say Mech Eng apprentice at BAE Systems might.

This is the route I took BTW.

I have had interviews just stop dead (with European companies) when it turned out I didn't have a Degree.

And I believe that jumping tracks is harder in Germany - even after the EU made them reform the system.

It is distinctively not the same as "high school drop out". These are people who do go to school, finish it and get a degree. These are people "within the education system" who were taught to do specific thing.

High school drop out did not finished the school he intended to and does not have degree. This is person who is "out of the education system" who are not assumed to know anything.

The social status is of course different due to the lack of recognition for the "high school drop out", but the years of education received are similar.

The type of education is however completely different. Years of education is meaningless metric in this context.

In one case you are learned woodworker (say) and in another ... nothing.

The ten years of schooling are in both cases general education, so they should be pretty comparable. Woodworking is something the German would learn during their apprenticeship and the American on the job (presumably).

How do companies who need skilled woodworkers in the US decide whom to hire? I'd guess they look for previous work experience. It's not clear to me whether an American who spent three years as an unskilled woodworker is any worse off in terms of job prospects than a German who spent three years as a woodworking apprentice.

When I was in high school (late '80s) vocational school was an option, and even regular high school had a good selection of shop classes. From what I understand this was mostly dismantled because of cost, liability, and the implied stigma of 'only' being a vocational school student. After all, if 'No Child Left Behind' then why would you send some to one school and some to another.

This kind of forced homogenization of outcomes is why many in the US are so skeptical of progressivism- instead of accepting that Johnny might succeed as a plumber let's force him to be another mediocre college-track student because the educational establishment 'knows' that's the only way to be successful.

The US is politically constipated. The people at the top do not want to help the people at the bottom at their expense, even though they have ALL of the power at this point.

They are not malicious, per se, but they don't explicitly care that a large portion of the population is becoming so abject that working in the amazon fulfillment gulags is their only option, and that public infrastructure is crumbling.

So when you ask: "Why doesn't the US do something GOOD for once?" The answer is: Oh, we want to. But our lords purse strings are too tight.

I hear you, but there's still market incentives for companies to participate: cheap labor for 2-3 years with good likelihood of a useful employee afterwards. I think in Germany they're paid ~ 1k Eur/mo. Clearly a progressive element helping those can't go to college so a branding value for SV types too.

Beyond that the administration of the program, certification at the end, etc. probably wouldn't be so expensive.

Think it shouldn't be viewed as threatening.

If the learning experience is simplified to listening to a lecture, either live or recorded, and all grading is done algorithmically, then yes, there is no scaling limitation. This would be considered a very poor learning experience though. Even in the School of Engineering at Harvard, even for the CS classes, very few use autograding. Students expect individual feedback on their work. They expect the ability to personally interact with teaching staff. They expect group work, labs, office hours, reading groups, and some level of supervision over these activities.

I work at Harvard, and I can tell you there is a real push to create a quality experience in remote learning, and a lot of resources are being directed towards this. It is not just the same classes via Zoom. Of course these enhanced learning environments could be replicated on campus as well, there's nothing particularly special about the remote learning environment.

But as you suggest, it is the residential experience that most folks are paying for. Harvard considers the residential experience as one of their primary value propositions. That is why Harvard and other schools are working very hard to get students back to campus. It's a difficult balancing act between this and maintaining the health of the campus. A major outbreak amongst undergrads would be a serious blow to everybody involved, so health is always going to come first.

Also worth noting that 20% of Harvard students pay 0 tuition, and more than 50% get needs-based scholarships. https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid. So if you're smart enough, and/or fit into the financial aid brackets, why not go to Harvard? What's the risk there?

>Also worth noting that 20% of Harvard students pay 0 tuition, and more than 50% get needs-based scholarships. https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid. So if you're smart enough, and/or fit into the financial aid brackets, why not go to Harvard?

Are you seriously suggesting that 50% the most talented students in the country have $313,000 for tuition?

If financial aid and scholarships worked as advertised, Ivy League schools would be filled to the brim with talented people. There would be no space left for stupid kids with rich parents. Yet those kids get in, reliably. There were many scandals related to that recently. Heck, just look at the children of major US politician and media elites.

Two kinds of students: Legacy and sports.

1. Legacy: If your parents went to Harvard, you're much more likely to get in. This allows the meritocratic wheel to keep turning, in theory, but in practice allows Harvard to let in many rich/privileged individuals who will not cost them and who may bring in big $$ donations over time.

2. Harvard brags about its myriad sports programs...WHY? If it's the best school in the world, why are they giving away 100's of seats to people who manipulate spherical objects adeptly? Their ability to manipulate objects or move their bodies skillfully has VERY LITTLE to do with progressing our civilization. Shouldn't those seats go to the next generation of brilliant minds, not brilliant bodies?

To be fair for your second point, speaking as someone attended an Ivy but is from a low income household and terrible at sports, many of the people who manipulated spherical objects adeptly also had brilliant minds.

I was always impressed with my friends who had the mental fortitude to wake up at 6 every day, practice for 3-4 hours, go to class, practice after class, and still take the courses/do the research necessary for elite graduate schools. Meanwhile, I woke up at 11 AM on a good day and only started going to the gym regularly my senior year. I honestly can't say the proportion of "regular" athletes to "smart" athletes was any different from that of students in the general population.

3-5 months after graduating university, I thought academic titles would mean something. Today I know better. I think this is a real good development. While I cannot complain about the quality of my former teachers, logistics of knowledge are cheaper than ever before. Everyone could at least listen to the best experts in their respective fields. Subjugating students with debts like that isn't common where I live and it looks "decently perverse" from outside the US.

I think it was always a brand but the educational value is questionable in modern times. What they sell today is mostly access and nepotism. I think a real benefit is the tendency to leave your family home for higher education. Maybe that is why I remember my time studying so fondly.

(I love my family, but if you don't want to get out of there by the time you hit 18, there must be something wrong with you)

I know most people on this forum are computer scientists but take a minute to think about engineers and scientists that require physical labs to learn. Bio/chem labs, machine shops, wind tunnels, research facilities... not all university degrees can be moved online.

CS is basically the only "useful" bachelors degree I've seen that's been widely implemented online. When I looked at going hack to school, the schools offering online degrees typically had a "meh" CS program and a variety of degrees that were in subjects not really opening you up to useful of even interesting employment. Also wayyy to many IT type degrees, which feel like a scam to me. I was under the impression that certifications are the big credentials for IT fields. Why pay tens of thousands for a degree program when you could put much less money into studying and achieving relevant certs.

Anyone who claims a university callibre education in any field can achieved by mass online lectures either completely wasted their time in university, or never attended in the first place.

The main purpose, and primary advantage, of a university is being a place of learning. That means you are embedded in a community that is focused around the pursuit of knowledge.

At the very least, you are embedded in a community of peers, some studying the same subject as you and invaluable as a resource to bounce ideas around with, and studying other subjects, giving you exposure to ideas you didn't even know to look up.

And that's before you even get to the fact that you get access to professors and other faculty who are extremely knowledgeable in their respective fields. Unless you are from an extremely academic background, it is highly unlikely your typical social circle includes several PhDs. But all your professors have one.

And compounding on that, you're in an environment designed to be conducive to learning. No where else will you find more resources and cultural forces aimed towards learning. Even those wild college parties are still filled with people who are engaged in academic pursuit at least half the week.

The scaling limit is that they would dilute their brand if they started letting in a lot more people. Exclusivity is one of their main value propositions.

>many are saying the large tuition fees for Zoom lectures aren't worth it.

If I was an outgoing high school senior this year, I would 100% be attending a community college in the fall. If you're all online, there are no connections to be made on campus, and res. life isn't part of the equation. At that point, there are no incentives to pay more for the same first two years of college.

Realistically, Harvard has the most exclusive brand name out of the entire sector. Harvard isn't going to have an issue finding full enrollment willing to pay whatever they are asked to pay.

I have 2 kids in college right now. One goes to a non-Harvard Ivy League school, the other one is at a state school. My wife and I both went to an average state school (as far as college rankings are concerned). We've gotten more insight than usual into our kid's academics as both of them have been home this spring and taking online classes due to the Covid outbreak. The level of academic rigor and the high expectations at the Ivy league school are through the roof compared to my own college experience and my other kid's academics. I frankly don't think I could have handled it had I been able to attend a school of that caliber. I can't speak for Harvard specifically but I have my doubts that an average student would survive for very long at some of these elite schools. I also have my doubts that their teaching style would scale real well to a large number of students. They rely heavily on hiring exceptional professors and giving them a significant amount of autonomy in the classroom. The class sizes are very small by university standards and the vast majority of assignments and tests are hand written and graded by the professor.

That's not really a good thing. What they are doing is changing a known transparent standard for entry to something completely arbitrary, ad hoc, and opaque from the point of view of the applicant. Also, the applicant pool will rise because there is no SAT filter.

Having said that, I don't think it's a big deal because nobody needs to go to Harvard. In fact, if you aren't affluent enough to afford Harvard tuition, or if you don't have a full scholarship, Harvard tuition is not worth the degree and student loans you end up with.

Harvard doesn't offer academic scholarships. If you can't afford Harvard tuition it's free - e.g. if your parents make less than 65,000 (20% of Harvard students) you don't pay anything. So yes, it's actually massively worth it if you can get in, because you graduate with no debt and have a name-brand diploma and access to an extremely well-connected group of people. It's the kids who go to second- and third-tier institutions and take on massive debt who should reconsider college, not the ones going to Harvard.

https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet

As someone who was accepted and got to see their financial aid package, I have to mention that it's extremely generous as well. They don't just cover room and board and tuition, there's an understanding that you're poorer than your peers at the university so there's general spending money, money to buy winter clothes, money to fly home 2x-3x a year.

This is a rounding error for Harvard, but I didn't realize how limiting not having that would be at the school I ended up going to (which only covered tuition and most of room and board).

So where was better than Harvard for you?

Hogwarts, obviously.

Johns Hopkins as per his profile. (He studied Biomedical Engineering)

I went to Hopkins to study bioengineering. This ended up being a tactical mistake - the media hype around the field gave me unrealistic expectations, the life of an underpaid academic no longer seemed appealing, coursework was incredibly difficult and graded on a harsh curve.

But it was incredibly useful because it took me off the default track. Had I gone to Harvard and enjoyed its attendant grade inflation and reputation advantages, I'd probably be floating around McKinsey and feeling self important right now.

Instead, I had to ask myself some difficult questions about what is important to me and how to make it happen in my life.

>Harvard doesn't offer academic scholarships.

OK, but there are other places that provide scholarships.

>if your parents make less than 65,000 (20% of Harvard students) you don't pay anything.

That's awesome for students from low-income families. I support it 100%! But let's be clear here, a family with a household income of $66k/year (up to, I don't know, $200k/year) cannot afford $85k/year tuition without the student going into massive debt. Those students shouldn't even look at Harvard. It's not worth it.

>It's the kids who go to second- and third-tier institutions and take on massive debt who should reconsider college, not the ones going to Harvard.

What are we arguing here? If a student ends up with massive debt from Harvard, that's not worth it either - right?

> But let's be clear here, a family with a household income of $66k/year (up to, I don't know, $200k/year) cannot afford $85k/year tuition without the student going into massive debt.

Click the link - "Families with incomes between $65,000 and $150,000 will contribute from 0-10% of their income, and those with incomes above $150,000 will be asked to pay proportionately more than 10%, based on their individual circumstances"

Essentially nobody graduates from Harvard with a significant amount of debt.

>Essentially nobody graduates from Harvard with a significant amount of debt.

That's great! No argument from me. If Harvard structures their tuition in such a way that students aren't graduating with a massive student loan debt, awesome!

You shouldn't have such strong opinions on things when you aren't willing to do even the most basic research.

I didn't make any strong arguments. Look back at see. All I argued was the following:

1) Harvard is not necessary for quality education (true)

2) Harvard is a great school and great a degree (true)

3) If you need to go into debt to pay for Harvard tuition, the Harvard degree isn't worth it, but if you can get it paid for (by whatever means) you should do it! (true)

Which part do you disagree with?

A big part of your argument relies on the cost of a Harvard education. This was completely dismantled at least 3 times that I see in this thread.

At some point you should have stepped back and said to yourself "maybe I don't know enough about Harvard to voice my opinion on it".

>A big part of your argument relies on the cost of a Harvard education.

Cite where I argued that please.

The argument was always framed as IF you have to pay $85k/y to go to Harvard and have to get loans to do it THEN it isn't worth it. Never wavered on that part. Never wavered on the part that Harvard is a great school. What I was informed about was a tangential point that Harvard has scaled tuition where nobody who can't afford tuition actually pays the full price. Good to know but that doesn't actually make a difference to my point.

Why exactly were you arguing so vociferously when all this information was available just one click away, at the link the other user provided?

This kind of comment (being unwilling to do even the most basic research before pontificating on something one doesn't know about) makes HN discussion poorer overall, imho.

>Why exactly were you arguing so vociferously when all this information was available just one click away, at the link the other user provided?

I wasn't arguing. The entire thread I repeated the exact same thing. Namely, that Harvard is a great school and a great degree but if you have to go into debt for it, it's not worth it as there are other quality institutions. I've never wavered from that argument.

Wow, they should have advertised this more heavily.

Not in a braggy way, but I recently (okay, it's been a little bit) looked into which colleges would be the best for me and I was looking into high-end signalling locations before eventually deciding to go with a more frugal option.

Though I wouldn't give up the experiences I have if I had to do it again, I had literally no idea they structured like this and didn't even consider them because of my perception of the astronomical price.

> Essentially nobody graduates from Harvard with a significant amount of debt.

Now I wonder:

1) how common it is to have such a tuition scaling?

2) can Harvard do this just because they have a shitload of money?

3) how easy/hard/expensive would it be for other colleges/universities to do something similar?

4) Is this possible only because a significant percentage of students are in the higher tiers and in practice their full tuition is what makes these discounts possible?

I don't have exact answers to your questions, but it basically comes down to the endowment. For example Princeton has an endowment of 29 billion dollars. There are 8,623 undergrads, and if you assume the full sticker price for tuition, room, board, and expenses ($75,210) reflects the actual cost, then it costs $648,535,830 per year to educate those students. That's 2.5% of the endowment if you assume nobody is paying anything and that it reflects the true cost; but the endowment grows by more than that annually just from investment returns!

At last check, Harvard has produced far more world class scumbags than my second/third tier state university alma mater. There's Larry Summers, who presided over their lame attempt to monopolize Russian ACH clearing after the Soviet party fell apart, which landed some professors in federal fraud charges. Then there's Tom Cotton who recently cheered on the idea of soldiers shooting at peaceful protestors at the behest of the NY Times, which fits with their hiring of noted NY Times managing plagiarist Jill Abramson, who had the nerve to say she wasn't paid enough to copy and paste other people's words. And considering Cotton Mather, Tom Cotton is only arguably the second worst Cotton to come from Harvard.

And we haven't even gotten to the MK Ultra participants, both willing in terms of the faculty and unwilling in the case of the Unabomber, have we?

The bad are so bad that they overshadow the everyday grifters, such as the William Empsons of the world who preached rugged individualism attained conveniently after suing their dead wife's family for a comfortable amount of money to live on while not needing anything from anyone else in a purely literary sense, I suppose.

The big takeaway I have from reading this thread is how many people think of the top Ivies as rich kid schools where most students are paying exorbitant amounts of money to attend. Probably a stereotype perpetuated by movies and TV shows...

There are certainly a lot of upper middle class students at Harvard (55% are getting aid and it's vaguely implied the cutoff for aid is around 200k, so around half of families make more than that), but that's not because poorer families can't afford to go to Harvard, it's a more systemic issue with wealthier families having more time and money to invest in their kids' education - good schools and neighborhoods, time for clubs and competitions, money for tutors and pricier extracurriculars, etc.

> top Ivies as rich kid schools

They're definitely that as well. Everyone that gets into Harvard is very talented, but the general groups of differentiation on top of that I see is:

(1) Rich kids who's parents can buy them opportunity, bribe the school with donations, and legacies.

(2) White/Asians from modest backgrounds that are "holy shit" levels of exceptional.

(3) Other minorities that are exceptional but more on the level of being a really good student.

Harvard and the other ivies aren't exactly transparent so I don't really know how accurate my perception is but that's what it seems like to me.

Fair enough, that breakdown sounds about right to me. Though it's important to note that "rich kids" here means really super rich. I recall once hearing some admissions person half-jokingly say that they don't even notice donations under $10m. Which kind of raises the question, if the kid's family is contributing that much to the school, and part of the value for regular folks going to these schools is the opportunity to network with people with exceptional backgrounds, perhaps the occasional "my mom paid for this building" or "my dad is a world leader" student is OK?

Yes using those numbers, Harvard legacy admissions is basically a "Buy One Give One Hundred" concept similar to Tom's Shoes concept of "Buy One Give One"[1] but applied to experiential goods.

With a $10M donation and tuition at ~$100,000, the super donor is essentially buying 1 admission for their student and giving 100 students free admission.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/beyond-buy-one-g...

Maybe we should just go back to divine right kings and cut out Harvard as the middleman.

Seriously, though, it is a complicated problem. Elites are going to get a leg up in any system. It's just a bad look when you're giving one group advantages because they are supposedly disadvantaged while also giving a leg up to the super privileged.

It's worth noting that this is not a case of "elites" taking out an unfairly large share out of a communal resource, it's the case of the elites choosing how much of their private resource they want to share with the rest of the society. It (e.g. Harvard) does not belong to all citizens/taxpayers, it belongs to the elites, and they can get as much 'leg up' as they choose.

It would be perfectly cromulent for Harvard to choose to admit only legacy students, and it could be a reasonable choice for them to set the tuition fee to a million dollars per year, with no scholarships whatsoever, and admit only rich students. They're not part of a government-funded education system with a goal of educating the whole society, they are a private school who can educate whomever they want - they can go back to teaching only Puritan clergy as they once did, if they so wish.

In essence, all the (quite welcoming!) financial aid and scholarships they're offering for talented students is freely given charity, funded by the fees of the rich students and gifts of alumni - and here we are complaining that they're not doing enough charity and not doing it in the right direction, forgetting that they might as well stop doing it at all if they wish.

They are essentially controlled by their alumni, who elect the overseers, so if the alumni collectively decide that it's good to invite talented-but-not-rich students with scholarships, because they believe it's best for their school and the children of alumni who also will be joining the school as legacy admissions, then that's their right to choose so. It's "their club" and they get to choose which non-super-privileged (if any!) they want to invite to their club.

This is in deep contrast with most other countries, where the elite universities tend to be funded and run by the government, who then gets to set policy to achieve relevant social goals, but in USA the top universities are private and their policy is controlled by the super privileged, not anyone whom the general public can elect.

Most of the Ivies are pretty generous when it comes to financial aid

> if you aren't affluent enough to afford Harvard tuition, or if you don't have a full scholarship, Harvard tuition is not worth the degree and student loans you end up with.

Ivy League schools are famously generous with financial aid. If the tuition cost is an issue for your family, odds are that you won’t be paying sticker price.

It would not be uncommon for a typical “middle class” family (not upper middle class, definitely not FAANG programmer) to pay no tuition, and loans, grants, work study, and family contributions go towards room, board, and miscellaneous expenses.

Please, some data to back this claim?

The point still stands that what you are paying for in college is a network and credentials. Harvard offers the best of both, but success is still a thousand inputs and statistical probabilities, no guarantees.

I've worked with several Ivy League grads, including some from Harvard. Some succeed, some still fail miserably. A good education improves your chances of success, but it isn't necessary. So unless you are getting that free tuition or come from a wealthy background, it doesn't make a lot of sense to go through the effort required for a school like that.

> unless you are getting that free tuition or come from a wealthy background

The point that's being made is that your "unless" covers effectively every single student at Harvard (and the other need-blind schools). If you get in, you're either well-off and don't care about tuition, or the price tag is going to be low enough that you can justify paying it to go to Harvard instead of taking whatever other scholarships you may have received (and it may even be overall cheaper than other schools).

These top schools know their students are getting full scholarships from other schools. They accepted them because they want them, and a couple thousand dollars a year's difference is a low price for them to pay to ensure the student chooses their school.

I think the only valid "unless" is "unless you're wealthy but not super-wealthy". There's certainly a range of income where they won't give you aid but you aren't that rich (maybe your parents are FAANG SWEs). If your family makes $800k a year, you probably won't get any financial aid but you may still balk at a $250k tuition.

This doesn't match reality. Obamas' student debt reached $40K each. And it most certainly got worse since then.

>Ivy League schools are famously generous with financial aid.

That requires quite a bit of qualification on your part. Ivy League schools will allocate a certain number of seats to allow those with the grades but without the means to attend the school. I guess that's generous, but let's not overstate this generosity. They need a lot more students paying full price.

>If the tuition cost is an issue for your family, odds are that you won’t be paying sticker price.

Like I said - if you can get a full scholarship to attend Harvard, great! Do it! If you need to take out loans that will leave you in debt for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars with nothing but a 4-year bachelor's degree from Harvard, run away!

> Ivy League schools will allocate a certain number of seats to allow those with the grades but without the means to attend the school.

Incorrect. All of the Ivies perform need-blind admissions for US citizens; they make an admissions decision without knowing whether the student will need financial aid (which is determined according to a formula). Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are furthermore need-blind for all non-American applicants, while the others look at need for a varying selections of non-American.

https://www.forsterthomas.com/admissionsconsultingblog/which...

Obviously, this is possible because they have huge endowments (they could do just fine charging zero tuition) and they know that statistically a large fraction of the admits will come from very wealthy families that will pay most/all of tuition.

All of this is untrue, and frankly it sounds like you are talking out of your ass.

1. Harvard (iirc, all Ivies) has need blind admissions. This is plastered all over their admissions materials. They want the best students period (edit: there are exceptions for international students at some schools).

2. None of the Ivies need the students to pay full price for tuition due to their endowments and other revenue streams. In fact, you would laugh if you saw how little undergrad tuition contributes to the school’s operating budget.

3. Scholarships are not the main source of free money. Most of the free money is in the form of need-based grants. Most (all?) of this grant money goes towards reducing all or part of the tuition cost.

4. For folks who come from modest means, loans and family contributions will be used almost exclusively for room, board, and miscellaneous expenses. The typical loan amount might surprise you by how low it is, and a 6-figure loan balance for an undergrad would be very unlikely (I’ve never heard of one, although they may exist).

Note that I am referring undergrad and not to graduate schools, especially professional schools... those are completely different.

Harvard started the institutionalization of "hollistic admission": https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in. According to the article, it was not about being fair, it was about limiting the admission of a specific group of people.

In general, the more complex a system is, the easier it is for people to game the system, and therefore the easier it is to hide inequality. It's hard to believe that Harvard does not know this, but I guess I'm dead wrong here as our progressives always ask for a more complex system to battle inequality.

In contrast, look at China. Their National College Entrance Examination is widely considered the most equal system in the country. Is it perfect? Of course not. However, students from poor country-side have a shot to get into elite universities. All they need are good teachers and well designed problem sets and text books . The cost of the books cost less than few Burger King's double cheese burgers. In the meantime, the government invested heavily on teachers. The result is that the best teachers are always in public schools. The inequality really lies in the fact that fewer and fewer quality teachers are willing to go to the poor areas nowadays. But hey, it's not like our government are focusing on raising teacher quality in the US either, right?

What about the fact that tests themselves can be gamed, we may ask, like students cramming for exams? The problem turns out to be relatively "easy" to solve: make tests differentiable. Just take a look at a problem set from India's JEE, China's NCEE, Korea's CSAT, or Japan's entrance exams from different universities. You'll see how hard it is to cram or to "tutor" for an exam. If we use math as an example, the only patterns one sees in a problem will be mathematical patterns. If one can cram for that, well congratulations, the person just learned good math.

Imagine looking at China and its massively wasteful system of cram schools and rote learning and thinking that's a system you would like to emulate.

Whether exams, which solely focus on academics, are effective for selecting talents is definitely up to challenge. That's a whole different topic from which system is less likely to be biased or gamed, though.

Just to fact check one thing: cram schools and rote learning for elementary students are rampant because of cut-throat competition for students to get into middle schools, but it's not that much in high school. Sooner or later you just can't rote learning any more. It's like one can probably rote learn James' Calculus, but good luck with Stein's or Rudin's Analysis. Besides, remember most of the good teachers are in public schools? The quality of cram schools was pathetic compared with what's offered by public schools, so the cram schools don't make much of a dent.

Generally speaking, the problem sets might seem harder but the average score is also lower, so it's a wash.

The key is "differentiating". Different students should fall into different score buckets -- a hard problem to solve, to which Chinese teachers dedicate large chunk of their time, for good or for worse.

> What they are doing is changing a known transparent standard

Unfortunately, the standard is a bad standard and I'm fully in support of abolishing the SAT as a requirement.

For engineers, the SAT math section basically amounts to measuring how many mistakes you make doing stupid easy math under 90 minutes of stress. The SAT verbal section basically measures how well you memorize word lists. Let's not BS ourselves -- I memorized word lists in high school and I almost never use any of those words.

For liberal arts, vocabulary knowledge is rarely the bottleneck in their ability to succeed, and the math is largely unimportant.

Neither part of the test is a good indicator of one's preparedness to receive a high quality university education, and much less an indicator of the type of education most people look for at Harvard.

Someone who wants to major in East Asian studies, for example, really doesn't need to know what "obstreperous" means, let alone an engineer or scientist.

Harvard doesn't need standards. They need a bunch of unique, bright people that are prepared to make change in the world in their own unique ways.

I went to "the other school" down the street from Harvard and from what I remember the application was heavily focused on extracurricular activities. I think that's a much better qualitative indicator of one's motivation and ability to go beyond courses and exams in their desire to learn and make impact.

Based on the downvotes, I guess HN is a bunch of adamant test-loving folks. I guess this kind of open discussion isn't welcome here.

It's often good to question assumptions. I happened to do well on SATs/ACTs, so I could be biased in their favor. But, I was curious--what is the actual predictive value of SATs/ACTs on college outcomes such as say GPA or graduation rate. This study would suggest that it's actually more predictive (at least in Alaska) than test scores: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/projects/project.asp?projectI...

Has anyone else found other studies? I would be shocked if there isn't some kind of meta-analysis. Before getting into any discussion about social issues, let's see whether the tests are actually predictive. Or, if it's just a cargo cult.

My intuition was that these tests (ACT/SAT) would help to normalize for different levels of schools, but I will go with data over intuition.

In some sense, this move by Harvard will allow for a natural experiment to see if there are actually changes in outcomes when GPAs are/are not considered.

The UC system has dropped SAT/ACT as well because the Regents determined them to be racist. In spite of internal studies at UC schools that determined that the way the test scores are being used is not racist or discriminatory.

important to consider distinction between test blind and test optional like harvard is doing.

test blind - don't even consider SAT/ACT even if submitted

test optional - will be considered if submitted, but not required.

My view is that more colleges will start going test optional as August rolls around, but only colleges that have committed to eventually phasing out testing (UC system) have gone test blind for next year.

The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for the SAT. For top schools all viable candidates had very good scores so it wasn’t much use.

It was just one of those things everyone did because everyone did it. With more opting out that momentum goes away and increasingly now people are asking “so why did we use this test again?”

Likely won’t be long until the SAT just disappears entirely and replaced with nothing, or subject tests or some other exams more practically linked to placement in certain programs.

> The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for the SAT.

I don't know about the SAT specifically, but in my country we also have standardized admission tests and, from my appreciation, it's good at measuring 2 things:

1. General Intelligence.

2. How well you prepared for the test.

Sure, (2) may be an undesirable artifact but I think that intelligence is a good way --if not the best-- to select people for college.

2 isn't an undesirable artifact. You want highly motivated hard working people applying to your university course. People have this idea of some genius slacker but you know what's better than a genius slacker? A genius who works hard. And frankly, most people aren't geniuses anyway.

You don't even need to raise the bar that much. A normal intelligence person who works hard is much better than a genius slacker. My experience is that a lot of people at the top of their high school classes get/stay their based on 1) general intelligence, 2) memorization skills, 3) socioeconomic advantages, 4) compliance. Of those factors, only #3 has a particular bearing on future success. At university, those who tend to be most successful as students tend to be those who are intrinsically motivated to work hard and study, and also those with socioeconomic advantages. After university, those with socioeconomic advantages tend to succeed regardless of their educational background, so there are fundamental reasons to investigate the systemic unfairness and discrimination in our society. Without trying to sound snarky, this is as linked to movements like BLM as it is to Harvard's discrimination against Asian applicants.

People think smart kids with lower-middle-class parents are losing out on college places to kids whose rich parents can afford $$$$ tuition at the crème-de-la-crème school for the rich and thick.

And that's both inefficient as we're not sending our best students to our best schools; and bad for social mobility as it makes it harder for those born poor-but-smart to improve their lot in life.

In my experience, hard work can make up for quite a lot.

I'm not sure which of the above is a better predictor of success in college or after.

It begs the question of if colleges should be selecting for general Intelligence over hard works.

On the other hand, removal of the SAT will probably put an even greater emphasis on school grades, which certainly correlates better with effort than general intelligence.

> It begs the question of if colleges should be selecting for general Intelligence over hard works.

Colleges should be building a model to determine who will derive the highest value from their education. Good inputs to this model include test scores measuring general scholastic abilities, actual performance during high school, notable achievements outside school, and the general background in which they made these accomplishments.

AKA, a lot like they're doing now. I don't think the testing portion of it should be eliminated.

Studies seem to show that SAT prep helps 20-30 points on average. AFAICT it does help to do SAT prep but it is a relatively minor factor.

for example: https://www.thoughtco.com/are-sat-prep-courses-worth-the-cos....

That's the average, which tells us nothing about the distribution. If you're looking at the top n% of scores, the distribution is important.

Furthermore, those studies weren't looking at kids who were prepping for 2 hours a day like many kids with perfect and near perfect scores are doing.

Also here's a study from 2017 that shows an average gain of 115 points with only 20 hours of practice (plus 16,000 students who gained more than 200 points).

https://www.collegeboard.org/releases/2017/average-score-gai...

Another issue is that scores have gone up dramatically over the last 20 years, so given that and the fact that Asian American kids are so overwhelmingly dominant, I think preparation being a major factor is the most likely explanation.

> The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for the SAT.

I've heard that claim a lot, but never accompanied by evidence.

Nobody I knew prepped for the SAT, and many got into top schools. Unless you count paying attention in math class, and reading adult level books "prepping".

I wasn't sure where to look for hard evidence for the claim, and I would love to see data showing the average SAT scores over time on a per-school basis. But this at least shows how admission rates have been consistently decreasing over (recent) time: https://www.ivywise.com/ivywise-knowledgebase/admission-stat...

I think it's reasonable to assume that the increased competitiveness in admissions leads to increasingly competitive attempts to game the admissions process.

Whether or not the original claim is true, I think it's certainly true that an increasing amount of cost and effort has gone into SAT prep. Certainly, that was my experience (if we're comparing anecdotes). Everyone I knew in the top percentile of my HS prepped for the SAT, and that was in the early 2000s. Based on one of your other comments, it seems that your personal experience was in the 70s -- how reflective do you think that is of the admissions process today?

> how reflective do you think that is of the admissions process today?

The college students I know today didn't prep for it, either, and one was accepted by Stanford and Caltech.

I've seen some claims that the SATs have been "dumbed down" or "re-normed" since the 70s. Certainly, the number of students who apply to elite colleges has increased substantially, which means there will be more with perfect scores.

That was a while ago though as you've stated elsewhere. The percentage of kids who score perfect or near perfect scores has gone up dramatically over the last 20 years.

https://www.compassprep.com/great-to-good-the-diluted-value-...

My scores where good enough to get in almost anywhere in the 2000s, but they're barley above the 50th percentile at our flagship state university now.

It's unlikely that the average intelligence of high schoolers has increased that much. It's much more likely that people have figured out how to prepare for the SAT.

There's a whole industry that also got built around test prep, and it's pretty lucrative. the tutor that my friends and I had was really expensive, and she consistently had kids that were scoring near perfect on the SAT and ACT.

Be careful about inferring that any gaming taught by the tutor made the difference. If the tutor was simply teaching the math needed, that would be fine.

The math needed to ace the SAT is taught in high school. If you slide by on that, you'll probably need a math tutor to make up for it. Or you can choose to learn the math presented in high school.

>The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for the SAT. For top schools all viable candidates had very good scores so it wasn’t much use.

There are many people who have high GPA's but are not intelligent enough to do well on the SATs. Removing this bar will allow those people through.

Not necessarily a bad thing but a thing nonetheless.

The point is that the SATs don't measure intelligence. "not intelligent enough to do well on the SATs" is harsh. And if anything I think it would go the other way--it's common to get a subpar grade on the SAT even if you are smart and a high achiever.

And regarding removing the bar allowing more people through, that's not true either--it's not like colleges all of a sudden have more seats available. They'll still only admit the same number of students, and they will still select for the best students.

>And regarding removing the bar allowing more people through, that's not true either--it's not like colleges all of a sudden have more seats available. They'll still only admit the same number of students, and they will still select for the best students.

But white people tend not do as well on the SATs, but they do fine with GPAs.

Now they can let more white people into the school and they don't have to explain the SAT discrepancies because they aren't measuring for that.

I'm a Canadian who went to an ivy for undergrad, and have always found the American attachment to the SAT a bit puzzling. I'm also puzzled at the widespread view that by removing the SAT some grave injustice or lowering in standards is inevitable. Canadian universities manage to admit students mostly just based on high school grades just fine. (Yes, there are provincial final exams but those scores often are not available for admissions since they're taken in the 12th grade). The SAT itself was an odd exam for me, unlike anything I ever had to take in Canada. The SAT IIs (and AP/IB exams) on the other hand seemed like they assessed things more reasonably. The SAT's heritage as a poor attempt at an IQ test which then morphed into whatever the heck it is today, makes its utility somewhat out of place compared to what most other countries do.

One issue that's brought up is heterogeneity in high school grading practices, but somehow Canada manages. In any case, for "elite" schools, what has always helped the typical middle / upper-middle class applicants are AP scores (if you have a few) and of course SAT IIs as well.

The most competitive universities in Canada, like McGill and UBC have 46% and 52% acceptance rates. Canada has more of a culture of going to college in the province you grew up. To compare that to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. that have sub-10% admittance rates and have to review tens of thousands of applications is failing to realize the scope of the problem these schools face in selecting students.

I'm very familiar with the scope of the admissions challenge and it's not really an issue of number of applicants. Most universities already have an understanding of different high schools (though often biased to wealthier communities). As for Canada, specific programs at Canadian schools can be quite selective - for example EngSci at the University of Toronto has a ~10% admission rate. Other programs are more like state schools in the US. Most elite schools in the US are still pretty regional heavy. For example 35% of Stanford undergrads are from CA and something like 30-40% of Harvard undergrads are from New England and the mid-atlantic.

Can confirm, some programs and unis are very selective with very low acceptance rates but the average student doesn’t usually have too much trouble getting into a relatively good program without having to do standardized tests

So Canadian universties don't admit homeschoolers since there are no high school grades?

Nope most do, I’m a homeschooled student and I got accepted into both UofT’s engsci and Uwaterloo software eng without a high school diploma.

they consider you on a case by case basis and recommend/require that you take 5-6 grade 12 courses that you can take at a school or through distance learning. Other standardized tests like the Sat and ap exams are also recommended

What do you do when a large chunk of the people that apply have a 4.0? How do you determine which person who got a 4.0 gets into your school. I know quite a few people who had a 4.0 + Close to perfect sat score + pretty good extra curricular not get in. If you are Indian getting into an ivy league school is largely luck. Does the admissions officer reading you essay like what you wrote. Does one of your extra circulars stand out.

The Canadian admission system and the American system is very different to start with.

In Waterloo Engineering (and presumably other schools as well), they take your high school marks, add some adjustment factor for your extracurriculars and essays, and then pick the top N students.

In top US schools, they practice holistic admissions, which means they pick N students from the applicants, without specifying an explicit ranking system.

In the first case, an applicant can be relatively aware of where they stand based on the marks they apply with, and they know that the process used to select will be mostly transparent.

In the second case, from the applicant's perspective, it's pretty much a black box as to what the outcomes will be. When one of only 2 predictable parts (SAT scores and grades) are removed, I think it's understandable that there's some concern.

Caltech is doing this -- actually, they're going test blind -- for two years. I think that's pretty notable, since I trust them to be interested in only admitting students that can pass their physics classes.

I know a girl who goes to caltech. She says that they don't require you to take a compilers class to get a computer science degree. Sounds like a joke.

They used to require an operating systems class that used Bryant and O'Halloran. Not the Dragon book but not nothing either.

dont worry, when the admitted student doesnt pass physics theyll say its because of systemic oppression and caltech will pad their scores to get them on their merry way

I'm a PhD student at Caltech. There's also a push to eliminate the GRE as a requirement for graduate admissions, in much the same way as some people want to eliminate the SAT as a requirement for undergraduate admissions. In my opinion both proposals are well-intentioned but ultimately bad ideas.

Why are they bad ideas? I took the SAT and GRE for undergraduate and graduate schools respectively and neither was worthwhile preparation for anything I studied. If we want to put up barriers to entry then I think we can find better and more predictive ways than measuring general pattern matching skills with the SAT and GRE.

To quote Scott Aaronson:

Admissions to the top US universities—and hence, most chances for social advancement in the US—will henceforth be based entirely on shifting and nebulous criteria that rich, well-connected kids and their parents spend most of their lives figuring out, rather than merely mostly based on such criteria. The last side door for smart noncomformist kids is now being slammed shut.

And to quote someone on HN:

Colleges, as insitutions, care about progressive, equality of opportunity values. Those nebulous criteria will coalesce to produce roughly the same outcomes that they currently do.

Will they?

They might adjust their admission picks until e.g. aggregate ethnic/racial admission stats look the same as before, but at the same time picking more of the rich, well-connected black/other minority kids and fewer of the poor but hardworking ones.

How many brilliant poor kids do they choose now?

Some? I think the assumption implicit in this thread of the conversation is that scoring well on the SATs is a way for brilliant poor kids to compete with rich well-connected kids.

When I attended Caltech, I didn't notice any bias towards rich kids. The ones whose families I knew were all economically ordinary. None of the kids had a Porsche or Ferrari or BMW or anything expensive. Hal Finney had an ancient VW bug, and I had my 67 Mustang. Another friend bought a Chevette upon graduation with his own money.

I was on financial aid myself.

Yes. I understand this is the assumption but why is this the assumption? I can imagine poor kids doing just as well if not better without artificial barriers to entry like the SAT and GRE. For some reason everyone is assuming these tests are "good" and "meritocratic" but I don't see it. Everyone seems to assume there need to be tests and no one is wondering what happens when there are no tests.

I suspect no one is wondering because without tests people have to face some harsh truths about economic and social class structures that most people in the US like to pretend do not exist. If these tests were about meritocracy then they would be enforced without exceptions and rich kids wouldn't be able to buy their way into their favorite schools like they do now after their parents make a generous donation. The existence of the test does not matter if you're rich enough so the argument about meritocracy rings hollow.

Poor kids aren't going to have the resources to compete as equitably on extracurriculars. A kid in a wealthy school might be able to host a fundraiser for charity and raise thousands of dollars easily, while a kid at a poor school would be able to raise only a fraction of that. That poor student is also going to have more trouble showing excellence in art/sports/intellectual hobbies if their parents aren't able to pay or take time off to send them off to competitions. The schools might be adjusting for the difficulty, but they'll be doing it in a very non-transparent way.

> Poor kids aren't going to have the resources to compete as equitably on extracurriculars.

Yes, that's my point. Given fewer learning opportunities poor kids end up at a disadvantage even though the next Einstein is more than likely somewhere in a poor neighborhood. The SAT might be a good way to find this person but it would be better if we required a standardized minimum from everyone and helped them as much as possible to achieve those minimum standards. That way the next Einstein wouldn't be like finding a needle in haystack with very poor objective measures of learning potential (Einstein himself being famously unfit for his own educational system based on standard measures of the time).

>Fifty-five percent of Harvard College students receive need-based scholarship aid, and the average grant this year is more than $53,000.

https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance#:~:text....

This reminds me of an article about tuition cost going up by just the right amount to make sure 55% of people qualify for financial aid. I don't remember where I read this but I remember the argument making sense. What numbers do we get when we look at what percentage of people qualify for financial aid at Harvard and how has this number changed? I wonder if they keep track of and make this data available?

It reminds me of a section of Thomas Sowell's book Discrimination and Disparities.

It was talking about automatic background checks for applicants at businesses. Some people wanted such processes to be illegal, on the grounds that they were supposedly racist.

In reality, automatic (i.e. indiscriminate) background checks actually resulted in more blacks being hired. Even if the local black population had a higher or much higher percentage of people with bad marks on background checks, being able to screen them out and allow those blacks with no bad marks to apply was made easy.

Without automatic background checks, employers fell back on their own biases, resulting in fewer blacks being hired.

The SAT is like an automatic background check. Without this indiscriminate screening, the schools have more ability to discriminate based on biases.

Credit checks had a similar impact for minority and disadvantaged communities. Before, if you wanted to get a mortgage or a car loan, the bank would assess you based on a number of factors. Many banks explicitly used race as a criteria for denial. Now, with near instant credit checks, race has been removed as an explicit criteria, rightfully leading to much higher rates of loans and mortgages for minority and disadvantaged communities. Are credit checks anywhere close to reliable or fair? Can you correlate race based on zip code or other factors? Yes, these methods are not anywhere close to 'good enough'. But they are miles ahead of the explicit racism that preceded these form of financial product applications.

Eh, this kind of "the sky is falling" argument doesn't hold much water to me. So, some "smart nonconformist kid" doesn't get into Harvard. Is that the end of the world? Larry Page went to Michigan, Brin to Maryland - they did fine. There are a lot of great public schools out there. Talented people like that aren't getting locked out of anything.

A much bigger problem in education starts much earlier. If your parents don't provide a stable and education-leaning home life, or you live in a school district where safety is a bigger concern than educational quality, well, social mobility becomes a lot harder then. These are some hard problems, but reach way beyond education, into the social safety net and beyond. Guaranteeing that a bright kid who is not born into the best circumstances gets a fair shot at life is still a work in progress, but has little to do with whether they get into Harvard or MIT.

That's really not the argument though is it? Saying "so what if someone are left out of X, Y is a comparable alternative" doesn't change the fact that X is being shut out. If you remove these "objective" measures, it starts being reliant on "holistic factors", and feels like this inherently gives an advantage to well off kids whose parents can send them on different summer schools or labs or whatever. Harvard (and the Ivy league) still maintains a reputation and the industry still does care about it (especially in liberal arts / banking etc), so these fields will reduce in accessibility to those who can't develop "holistic skills".

The other problem you point to is very real, but that's independent of the issue currently being discussed in this post.

I am hard pressed to think of better methods to fairly and uniformly measure if person A is more qualified for college than person B. There has to be something to differentiate, as objectively as possible, between candidates. And, while not perfect, standardized tests fit the bill.

I, for one, find standardized tests far more stomach-able as barriers to entry to a university than the exclusive whims of administrators attempting to gauge the qualities of applicants.

Universities just need to do a good job of weighting the exams - I had lackluster LSAT scores, though not awful, but wrote an amazing law school entry essay and had a unique background: AmeriCorps, ski bum, tutor, etc... that catapulted me in to law school.

Entirely removing any type of exam from the college entry process just seems antithetical to what college is about.

Edit: a word.

Why aren't high school class grades enough? If we want predictive measures then why not make the preparation for college the actual measure instead of tacking it on at the end as another exam. I can see it being useful for people who don't go through the traditional path and need to prove that they have the equivalent knowledge of a typical American high schooler but otherwise I really think there is no value in these tests.

Because there's nothing even remotely standardized about high school education. A kid growing up in Seattle learns about evolution, while a kid growing up in small-town Oklahoma learns that Jesus rode a dinosaur to work. Cultural differences aside, a student who graduated #1 in a class of 50 probably enjoyed a fraction of the learning opportunities available to a child who graduated #12 of 500 at a larger school.

These are the problems that standardized tests were supposed to solve. Eliminate the tests, fine, but you'd better have an adequate replacement for them in mind.

I'm not arguing for their elimination. I'm sharing anecdotal evidence that they weren't useful for me and probably people like me who got an adequate education and had access to a local community college and a library.

Re: uneven distribution of education. This is the fundamental problem and standardized tests don't actually address the root cause. We really shouldn't be confused about what skills and concepts people need to learn up until high school and the rigor with which they need to learn them. Addressing this confusion is a hard problem so post high school standardized tests end up being the band aid. We can keep the tests and work to address the underlying root causes for uneven educational outcomes. Test preparation industry is essentially a form of tax on something that we should have democratized by now.

You can do test prep for free online now.

That's very useful. Do you have any favorite links/resources?

No, I'm not a student.

Well... we're all ultimately students, just a question of which subjects and disciplines.

There are 24,000 high schools in the US (not even considering international students) with wildly varying grading standards. You have one applicant from Podunk City High School, valedictorian with a 4.0. Is that ... good? How does it compare to the thousands of other kids with 4.0s you have applying?

I'm completely sympathetic to the idea that grades should be a better predictor of performance than one day of testing, but in practice the grades have a lot of flaws too.

I don't know if it's good or bad. I don't think grades mean much either other than a feedback/signal for the student. Using them as measuring sticks for admission into exclusive clubs seems pretty broken. We should be lowering the barriers to education and the exclusive clubs that elite educational institutions demarcate.

I want more people that study calculus and higher level mathematics because it is a standard part of their education and not because it is a requirement on some test. I don't care what grade they get on their exams because if I end up working with them I'm not gonna care about the grade but the fact that they learned how to think rigorously (or at least were given the opportunity to do so without having to waste effort and energy on playing status games).

> There are 24,000 high schools in the US (not even considering international students) with wildly varying grading standards. You have one applicant from Podunk City High School, valedictorian with a 4.0. Is that ... good? How does it compare to the thousands of other kids with 4.0s you have applying?

Some other places in the world admit based on the Z-score for each subject, with the average and standard deviation being specific to each school. While the university might not know how one would compare to other students based on an equivalent test, they'd at least know that a particular student is in the top decile for their school in a given subject.

The SAT is an objective measurement. By dispensing with it, all the other measures are subjective. This means that it leaves the administration free to admit whoever they please, based on any agenda.

Are there any laws about SAT score requirements for school admission? Because if there aren't then the administrators are not obligated by any rules/laws for objective measures. If that's the case then they are free currently as well. No law means no actual requirement to abide by any rules that reduces freedom in their decision making process.

The SAT scores open the colleges to lawsuits that they are discriminating.

Do you have a list of such suits and success stories that ended in favor of the poor student?

Some people self study and pass GRE subject tests without having done the relevant undergraduate degree. Especially in fields such as mathematics and physics where testing results are easily quantified, this is a gradually growing long-term threat to the credentialing power of universities.

If an independent company comes along that can reliably get students to equivalent GRE subject test scores in a hard science most quickly than the university itself does, the result could be many of the best students stop applying. Some would just take the nontraditional route, save a fortune, ace their GREs and apply as a graduate student. Others would take their tests as evidence of their skills and and go directly into industry.

Making this move now, before such a challenger exists seems like a "good" idea from the selfish perspective of universities.

What motivation does CalTech have to retain ownership of credentialing powers? I can't imagine the administration there caring about anything less.

Money? Undergraduate attendance is typically a vastly larger revenue stream.

Most of Caltech's revenue is from government and private research grants, not tuition. They only raised it because they don't have economies of scale for their undergrad program and admissions wanted to keep up with the Joneses at Stanford and Princeton,

That's news to me if true. Do you have any resources I can check out?

I was rather intimidated by the GREs, but when taking the test I was shocked at how easy it was. None of it went beyond sophomore level, if even that.

I concluded that the only purpose of the GRE was to filter out the complete frauds.

I had a GRE score in the 50th percentile and was still accepted because of my research focus. My PhD was fairly successful with a track record that was better than most of my peers. So, my disdain for these general-purpose tests is quite personal.

In my opinion, the GRE mostly checks how good you are as a test taker. None of that is important to academic success. It invariably filters for a fairly streamlined and optimized class of people, who have the money and time to invest into such a test.

The fact that the ETS seems to have a clear profit motive really rubs me in the wrong way. It is a private organization attaching itself to education and siphoning the money off students by selling their tests and training materials. Universities should design their own admissions tests and not rely on such parasitic entities.

I don't agree with the idea that one can "optimize" for the GRE without knowing anything relevant to the field the GRE is in.

I did not optimize for the GRE, I did not prep for it, I did not look at a study guide for it, I simply went and took the test cold. The questions were on material one would expect to cover in basic engineering and science courses.

I don't buy the notion that anyone who does well on the GRE is doing it with tricks and fake/useless knowledge and/or cheated.

But you are kind of proving the point with your example... you are in the minority, and most people do not take it "cold". If everyone took it cold, then what you said makes more sense. But most people, unlike you, are trying to game the system for a higher score, through extensive prep work and additional test-specific training (else, why would there be so many test prep books and courses and tutors out there?). The fact that you didn't utilize those methods doesn't mean others won't.

In a sense, you're like an athlete who doesn't take steroids or doesn't push the limits of doping policy by trying to game the countermeasures, and instead of feeling aggrieved that others are achieving similar/better results as you via their just-within-the-letter-of-the-law tactics (or sometimes wildly outside the law tactics, a la Varsity Blues), instead you still feel some allegiance to an idealized view of a fair system that simply doesn't exist.

> why would there be so many test prep books and courses and tutors out there?

People are always looking for an edge, and entrepreneurs are always going to be trying to sell them one, whether it works or not. (Look at all the diet books out there, it's a billion dollar industry.)

> idealized view of a fair system that simply doesn't exist.

I'm not suggesting it is ideal or perfectly fair. I'm suggesting it isn't nearly as irrelevant as many argue.

For those who want to prep or game the system, why not do it right? Take the math classes, and actually learn math.

Which subject test was it that you took?

Engineering

I went to Caltech in the 70's. Caltech did a pretty good job of only admitting people who could hack the program. But they did make mistakes here and there, and those would suffer the humiliation of flunking out. This did nobody any good.

BTW, I found out years later that they took a chance on admitting me, and I very nearly flunked out my freshman year before I found my "sea legs". I was rejected by MIT, Harvard, and Stanford.

My run-of-the-mill state school had quite lax admission standards. It was understood that most of the freshman class each year would just party and flunk out after one or two semesters. As long as grading standards are maintained, I suppose that's another way to go.

Why do you think this is a bad idea? Shouldn't it be a data based decision? https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaat7550

I think it's a bad idea. There are people who grew up in poverty that still do well on the SAT, in fact that's exactly what the SAT is for - to identify those people, who might not be informed about math competitions or intel science fairs, or have connections at local universities, but have good potential.

SATs don't test potential. They, and GREs, explicitly test general baseline knowledge in a couple of subject areas. A person who grew up in poverty is still going to do poorly on a standardized test unless they have committed at least some effort to learning those things (whether through school, self-study, or a form of tutoring).

SAT’s don’t test baseline knowledge, they “require” it. That’s early high school math and English language. The SAT tests ability to perform cognitive tasks, like solving math problems and answering questions about passages you’ve read. If it were about knowledge, the questions would ask about facts.

I only know about the math subject GRE but it certainly was testing problem solving ability moreso than knowledge, many of the questions designed so that the clever can solve them quickly to save time.

It's not a stretch to posit that Caltech is the most competitive university on the planet. Test scores were already a poor indicator for them, since their applicant pool is well outside the effective measurement range of standardized testing.

Ah, those pesky standardized tests.

Sure they're the hardest part of admissions to game and are a major part of establishing an even intellectual playing field for applicants, but it just looks so bad when we discard a much higher proportion of qualified Asian applicants than qualified applicants from other groups! We were even sued over this issue and the suit is going to appeal!

And we're trying so hard to increase the numbers of admitted applicants from other groups but their standardized testing scores just aren't up to snuff...

I know! Let's just get rid of the tests! Then we can enforce whatever arbitrary (and race based) standards we want without annoying complaints that we're discriminating against qualified applicants.

What's that? By enforcing artificial "race" quotas we're just further dividing people based on race? Nonsense, our humanities department tells us that reifying race and obsessing over it is the best way to achieve a post racial society!

The problem is that standardized tests worsen the gap between the privileged and not. Test performance correlates strongly with how much prep you receive. Wealthy, white & asian students have the advantage there.

Not to mention that I am not convinced these tests strongly correlate with one’s ability to successfully complete an undergrad degree.

What's harder: gaining admission to a prestigious private high school that costs $50,000 a year or getting a few cheap SAT test books, watching some free YouTube videos and practicing for a few weeks?

The point is that the SAT can be practiced for (to a small extent), but the resources necessary to improve one's score are cheap and widely available. It's one of the most equitable aspects of college admissions we have.

> Not to mention that I am not convinced these tests strongly correlate with one’s ability to successfully complete an undergrad degree.

I'm pretty sure that they do, at least if you're looking at the set of all students and not "students who got into university X". (If you only look at students who got in, you get issues like this [0] where height does not correlate with performance in the NBA, likely because short guys in the NBA had to be more skilled to get there in the first place)

After all, the ACT/SAT are largely poor IQ tests, and IQ really does predict academic success...

0: https://twitter.com/page_eco/status/1160900306588164096

> they're the hardest part of admissions to game

Are they really?

Yes.

This makes sense: Harvard has a huge issue with discrimination against Asian Americans, who are not represented according to their ACT/SAT score distribution. If Harvard could waive away these scores, they can continue their admissions policy that favor students from wealthy families who pay full price, and are likely to be institutional givers after graduation by focusing on admission factors that are much less accountable, like "personality".

Student's for Fair Admissions is in the process of suing Harvard over discrimination, and their website (with legal filings) is probably the single best source of information on Ivy League admissions: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/updates/

They lost the lawsuit: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/harvard-admissions-law...

It’s being appealed. That’s in your article.

>This makes sense: Harvard has a huge issue with discrimination against Asian Americans, who are not represented according to their ACT/SAT score distribution. If Harvard could waive away these scores, they can continue their admissions policy that favor students from wealthy families who pay full price, and are likely to be institutional givers after graduation by focusing on admission factors that are much less accountable, like "personality".

Please. This is about affirmative action for people who aren't Asian or White. Not wealthy donors. The argument is that lack of privilege causes poor SAT scores which is preventing certain minorities from realizing their potential, and that this justifies selectively lowering the bar and allocating additional resources.

But this is all based on a conflation between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity.

> Not wealthy donors

Harvard's admission rate is <6% for general population - that includes affirmative action ethnicities. Harvards admission rate is >30% for "legacies" which make up one in six of their students, and even higher for donors. These are the kids who get in while being thick as a brick. The injustice is not primarily the black kid with 1400 SAT getting in over the east Asian kid with 1580 -- the injustice is the hundreds of CEOs/senators' kids being assured admission even being dumber than a sack of hammers.

25th percentile for Harvard SAT scores is 1460...so there is a limit for how many dumb as a brick legacies matriculate :-)

1 in 6 is only the 17th percentile, so many of them may be well under that score.

I would expect legacies to have a higher admission rate. They are a subpopulation coming from homes with intelligent parents, likely grew up in intellectually stimulating environments, and were probably focused on the Ivy League before many of their peers had even heard that term.

There is definitely some application boost legacies get simply by virtue of being a legacy, but their applications are probably quite strong in general. So it's unlikely that dropping the SAT was meant to cater to them.

This should be easy to test, right? Look at the percentage of students admitted to Harvard whose parents went to Harvard vs. the percentage admitted whose parents went to some other similarly-selective school.

No, it's about pretending they are making changes while still only allowing the same wealthy families they did before.

I'm not sure about this. I'm not a fan of the ACT/SAT (I've never taken them and somehow wound up with a master's degree) - but what I worry about them is that it removes one somewhat objective measure that you could point to in scoring. When you remove that, well, what do you look at? I think that's where we see students who come from well-off families have an even larger advantage because they can be captain of the sports team, the debate team, volunteer at the hospital, etc. Whereas if you are poor and smart - you work a second job to support your family, or you spend as much time not at home as possible.

Good luck convincing an admissions officer that working a second job is more "valuable" in the process than doing all these other things when they want to maintain the "image" of the university.

Without an ACT/SAT you'll also probably get more applicants hoping to hit the lottery from an admissions officer too.

I will say that obviously wealthy parents can pay for a tutor for the ACT/SAT, but a poor kid can get a practice book for $20 and at least have a shot.

> The argument is that lack of privilege causes poor SAT scores which is preventing certain minorities from realizing their potential, and that this justifies selectively lowering the bar and allocating additional resources.

The UC system also removed SAT recently arguing it discriminates.

I haven't seen clear evidence though that the SAT discriminates more against poorer students than any other admissions factor. In fact given that richer kids go to elite colleges at higher rates than middle income, conditioned on same test score, I'm inclined to think it's being underweighted.

The Regents argued that the tests discriminated w/o evidence.

Internal UC studies that looked into how the test scores were applied to admissions determined there was no discrimination.

>The Regents argued that the tests discriminated w/o evidence

That's the entire diversity/inclusion in a nutshell. None of this has been scientifically verified and the basic premise is in contradiction with what we know about humans. But bringing this up anywhere where your name is visible is liable to get you cancelled.

Exactly.

First of all a distinction must be made between legacies and big donors. Legacies are often dismissed as getting in only because of their legacy status, but I'd wager that their grades, test scores and other accomplishments put them on the admissions bubble already. Dropping the SAT isn't going to help Harvard let more of them in because they're probably doing quite well to begin with.

Donors' children may have more wiggle room with their grades and scores, but they're a much smaller population than legacies and the idea that Harvard is going to drop standardized testing just to marginally increase the numbers of donors' children they can let in, like some nefarious plot to marginally increase donations, is laughable and culturally tone deaf.

Harvard administrators have no interest in drastically increasing the number of legacy or donor students. The admissions rates for those groups have likely been static for decades.

Harvard administrators do, however, have a huge interest in increasing black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) admissions rates. This is made much more difficult by standardized testing scores.

In fact much of the stated justification by the schools and other intellectuals for dropping the tests is that it discriminates against the poor and minorities, which is ironic because it is one of the factors of admission least correlated with wealth and also because many minority groups do better on the test than the overall test taking population.

As an Asian American myself, I don't understand this notion of discrimination against Asian Americans by Ivy League schools. Per Harvards Class of 2023 Admissions data [1], Asian Americans makeup 25.3% of the admitted class. They're the largest minority group admitted.

[1] https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

It doesn't make sense to assume that the HS student population is uniformly qualified to meet Harvard's admissions bar (absent explicit racial discrimination). There's a reason nobody really accuses the NBA of racial discrimination in drafting players.

It's not really fair to compare the NBA to Harvard. The NBA is a for-profit institution in the entertainment business that is interested in drafting the most talented players to get the most views and therefore, the most most money.

Harvard is a non-profit institute that seeks to create a diverse & successful that leave a mark on the world, which therefore upholds the eliteness of Harvard.

> The NBA is a for-profit institution in the entertainment business that is interested in drafting the most talented players to get the most views and therefore, the most most money.

So exactly like Hollywood who has rightly or wrongly be heavily campaigned against because of discrimination, btw it is ironic but if you check the numbers white women are over represented same as black people, the 2 leading-voices among the minorities, its is Asian- Americans, Hispanic-Americans and Native Americans who are completely sidelined in that industry.

harvard has the right to implement its own standards, to be sure.

but who is implementing this, exactly, and on what agenda?

it's "harvard" the institution, the non-profit business.

instead of having a clear motive: making money, we have to guess what "diverse and successful" means.

does a powerful institution in our society owe us an explanation for this? maybe not.

This is the most puzzling aspect. Not sure how anyone could claim with a straight face Harvard unfairly discriminates against Asian applicants.

There's definitely something else going on here.

Statistically, Asians have higher than average SAT, ACT scores, this is not contested.

In 1996 California passed prop 209 which banned affirmative action on the state level. All top UC schools have become majority asian despite California being less than 20% asian.

Now considering Harvard, there was a federal case brought against it since asians scoring higher marks than peers were being rejected.

Harvard's defense was that they were scoring lower, on average on "personality" scores -- a qualitative measure on admissions.

By contrast, african americans were scoring highest on these personality scores.

Ultimately, the case was won by Harvard since the intent was not determined to be pernicious.

It's no question Harvard artificially diversifies its student body, but affirmative action does come at a cost.

How was personality scored? Was this specified?

In a system based on merit, they would get more placements.

Merit is not a perfectly objective concept. Someone has to come up with criteria based on whatever goals and values they think are important.

> Someone has to come up with criteria based on whatever goals and values they think are important.

The most obvious criteria is: most likely to graduate.

Some others that aren't bad:

* Highest expected value of future donations

* Highest expected value of impact (publication)

* Highest expected value of future salary

* Highest expected value of holding public office (the weighting here might be contentious)

As long as all of the criterion are achievement based, I expect them to screen for roughly the same people, demographically.

Highest expected value of future donations

This. This is the one. If you view everything Harvard does as supporting this goal, it all makes perfect sense.

You don't necessarily want the smartest kids. You want the kids that are most likely to go on to make the most money AND the kids who are most likely to have a strong emotional connection to the university so they write big checks.

I’d add “most likely to become famous for a good reason.”

Most likely to graduate is interesting. Almost everyone I know who didn’t graduate, it was due to finances. Purely academic reasons, at least anecdotally, seem relatively uncommon now.

> Almost everyone I know who didn’t graduate, it was due to finances. Purely academic reasons, at least anecdotally, seem relatively uncommon now.

That's probably true for the Ivy's since they get the cream of the crop.

The community colleges near me have a 25% 6 year graduation rate. I guarantee you that's not all due to finances.

Not sure that's the right approach. Admitting people who are most likely to succeed is credit-taking in the guise of teaching. To maximize college's benefit to society, I think you should admit people whose success would be most improved by college. It would be a bit counterintuitive though, you would mostly admit average applicants (because top ones will succeed anyway).

> To maximize college's benefit to society, I think you should admit people whose success would be most improved by college.

1. I'm have yet to be convinced that Harvard is trying to maximize its benefit to society.

2. Even if we stipulate that Harvard's sole goal is to maximize its benefit to society, it may be that increasing the number of Jeff Deans or Jim Kellers, even by a small amount, is more beneficial to society than better educating a lot of average people.

... or it may not be. My point is that the approach you suggest is not obviously correct.

Two of Harvard's most famous students: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't graduate, but the Harvard name still got boosted by the fact that they attended.

> Merit is not a perfectly objective concept

Well, it used to be, but it isn't any more now that they're rejecting standardized tests.

Those kids should then go on to and excel elsewhere with their "Master of Standardized Tests" degree.

> Merit is not a perfectly objective concept

Perhaps, but sure as hell is better than race to qualify a candidate.

You dont understand until your kids get rejected despite having straight A, high SAT scores and strong background, just because many other people whose ancestors come from a similar region on earth were as highly qualified too. So your kid is out not because of her fault but because of her race. I suppose many people are OK because deep down they think they will be in the accepted portion but still.

Just say that your child identifies as [insert popular identitarian group of the day] and put them between a rock and a hard place. They'll either have to accept your kid anyway, or admit that their agenda is BS and watch the facade crumble.

And that person will still get into a great school. It just doesn’t have to be Harvard.

Anecdote: I had straight As in high school, took every AP class they offered, 98th percentile SAT and got rejected from every single college I applied to except for one state school which I’m pretty sure they were obligated to accept me to for being a resident

Not necessarily. I have a niece who is a textbook A-plus Asian student, she didn't get into any top school nor did any UC-school accept her. She is in a CA community college now hoping to transfer later. (She did get into an expensive 2nd tier private college, but since Covid shut everything down she withdrew and transferred to a CC near home.)

Years ago I tried to counsel her parents into letting her do extra-curricular activities that did not fit the stereotypical Asian student profile, but they would not hear it. Piano it was, rather than sports or other non-academic work/volunteering. They did not understand that an Asian girl with a 4+ GPA and years of piano training was not going to get a fair shake when it came to college admissions.

Top 9% of students in the state have UC guarantee (https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...) by pure test scores and grades.

Yeah, you might not get Berkeley, but an A+ student is guaranteed admission to a UC. The profile you describe is far better than the average student at UCR and would be quite competitive at Davis or Irvine.

Did something fall through here? Did she not even apply to a mid-tier "safety school"?

You can say exactly the same to the candidates who jumped above her not by academic merit but by other nebulous criteria.

When have these schools ever said they care only about academic merit? They explicitly don’t and never have; every high school has a counselor that will tell you that you need to have more on your application than grades and a test score.

They make up 25.3% of the admitted class but would probably make up 75-80% of the admitted class in a system truly based on merit. 4 out of 5 strong applicants are rejected simply because they're Asian American.

Let's not exaggerate things. Comparing UC or Caltech is probably best (granted they use less controversial socioeconomic factors). Caltech is 43% Asian American vs 27% at MIT. Note that the race-neutral number is somewhere in between (Asians disproportionately yield to schools that don't use racial preferences because they are discriminated against elsewhere)

The competitive admissions high school I went to (which has an SAT average similar to Ivy League universities) has a completely race/SES-blind admissions system and is now 70% Asian.

That's a function of local demographics as well though. Lowell high school in San Francisco has those numbers but that's in part due to (more affluent than average) whites long fleeing the SF public schools.

But whites still are the majority in SF by a huge margin.

? Have you ever been to SF? That's not true for the general population and even less true for youth. And the white youth that are there tend to go to private schools

https://priceonomics.com/where-are-all-the-white-people-in-s....

I live in SF, i grew up in the bay.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Demographics_of_San_Francisco#:~....

>Asians disproportionately yield to schools

No Asians go big or go home. They yield to all schools that are prestigious regardless of race-neutrality because all of these school (on the surface) appear to be race neutral.

Maybe, but students also want a diverse student body if they're going to an institution like Harvard. I doubt that the top X% of students who get into Harvard want to be surrounded by people just like them. They want diversity and different perspectives from people who are creative intelligent. That's the appeal of institutions like Harvard.

Lets ignore your claim at possible discrimination, and ask what the ability to game a high score on an ACT/SAT has anything to do with how successful or contributing to society someone will become?

In the internet age that we live in today, with access to all sorts of methods of memorization, I would argue scores on a standardized test are largely irrelevant, beyond testing for if someone can pass a test or not. The highest score goes not to the person who thinks critically but to the one who gamed the system the most. If you can teach someone to win at candy-crush, you can get them to ace the SAT's.

Some of the most important people in society have not typically done well in structured schooling, and this is in part because a lot of education is bs in the first place.

I would argue that "structured schooling" refers more to a university than to the SAT.

Personally I see more merit in performing well on an exam with a clear statistical context, than in filling out some bullshit lab notebook or whatever it is that people at Harvard do to earn their A- (mean grade) or A (mode).

One problem with your argument is that, without the SAT, admissions counselors will have to depend MORE on structured schooling, because they have to lean more heavily on grades, school activities, and teacher recommendations.

Your initial question, by the way, is flawed. School is not success, and education by itself is not a contribution to society. So why you use those things to judge a college entrance exam is unclear to me.

An entrance exam is a measure of intellectual horsepower. Tons of rich people throw money at SAT courses and still fare poorly, while tons of smart kids whose families wouldn't be able to afford college without financial aid fare well.

> An entrance exam is a measure of intellectual horsepower.

No its not. What are neurons? What are networks of neurons? How do the wiring of neurons affect the way an intelligence output answers? Can neurons be cultivated in certain ways? If so, can you cultivate a network of neurons to output answers with the most efficiency and correctness?

If so, what is the difference between one network optimized for standardized testing and another optimized for political upheaval? Do the neurons fire less quickly in the latter because they can't pass the answers to a test as quickly?

the best performers at school often become career academics -- a few research discoveries aside, you could say this is a pretty low-leverage position.

In other words, as you said, doing well in school means little outside of school.

So if you really wanted to come full circle on it, you could say it's actually good that people who aren't able to game a system, end up staying outside of that system.

This is real institutional racism in my opinion. There are enough reason why Asians tend to do better than other groups without using explanations provided by neo-nazis that grade humans by intelligence or whatnot.

But it just plainly is racist against Asians. There is no greater good to be defended here that isn't a lie. And they even have a history of discrimination with quotas, although I tend to classify AA as not being racial quotas. But if people are measured unequal due to their race, they only affirm that race exists and that they don't treat everyone on their merits. I don't see advantages here.

As I said, logistics of knowledge are so cheap, that good education can reach anyone. Maybe a teacher is missing here, but it is a solid start.

Wow, you don't even try to hide your obvious bias. The best source of info is one side of the legal battle? What a joke.

Very considerate of them. Now the affluent parent won't need to abase themselves to bribing and fabricating sports credentials[0], it will just work out on its own.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...

Very mixed feelings on this.

I got terrible grades throughout high school (despite taking AP classes), and the only reason I was able to attend college was because I had very high ACT scores (perfect in English, and 2 points away from perfect in Math).

The way I see it there are two kind of perspectives you can take on this: A) I was a lazy kid who skated by and short-circuited my way through college or B) the school system failed me and I shouldn't be punished by not being able to attend college.

Honestly, I tend to gravitate toward option A, but it does make me wonder how much weight we should really assign to GPAs.

This recent trend of eliminating the SAT/ACT reads to me like: “Let’s eliminate these measures that allow high performing students to objectively differentiate themselves, in favor of a more opaque admissions process where we can implement discriminatory policies without scrutiny.”

I’m originally from a third world country and those practices look unbelievably awful to me.

If this happened at a corrupt country, you can bet that university would be full of students that entered there just by nepotism, it is also very effective for discriminating against minorities.

I get that USA isn’t as corrupt as many of the third world countries but it is going there with slow and steady steps, removing SAT scores might make USA lose it’s scientific status in near future.

>allow high performing students to objectively differentiate themselves

Except the argument by people is it's NOT objective. I think the argument goes something like this: rich kid gets full time tutor privately or through school and is able to do significantly better on the SAT/ACT because they have specifically prepared for it.

It doesn't mean they are smarter, or even a better student. It means they have been prepped better for it than their peers that don't have the same luxuries.

If 95% of the time a student scores higher after taking an expensive prep course, does that mean scoring higher really means much? Especially with SO many people taking the test, that little bit makes a difference where are you on the curve.. perhaps people are thinking that the kids whose parents can afford the time and money to give them a slightly advantage on the test doesn't translate into that person being a better student.

This is a myth. Almost nobody, even among "rich kids", gets a full time tutor for the SAT/ACT. Most just use the same cheap tools everyone else does - a Barron's test prep book.

Isn't this a one year experiment due to Covid?

Let's talk practically, this will hurt people who did best on SAT (asians and jewish people who studied hardest, not rich white people) and help those who did poorly (blacks and hispanics).

The SAT isn't perfect and you can prepare for it (to an extent), but its alot better than GPA or any other measure as atleast it's consistent between schools.

It was actually introduced to help be more egalitarian and meritocratic. And its been shown to correlate pretty well with general purpose IQ tests as well as later success in life.

Removing it will no doubt help them discriminate more against asians and jewish people. they introduced meritocracy and it produced a result they didnt like for certain races so theyre removing it.

So now they can have exactly the demographics they want. Those pesky objective criteria kept creating inequality.

Predicting a human being’s ability to “succeed”, regardless of domain, is very difficult.

The insights from YC’s process might be useful. While intelligence is important, it isn’t the most important variable. What matters most is a determined-to-succeed-at-all-costs team.

In the case of education, it makes sense to have some kind of threshold for general competence (GPA for instance) which is required, but subsequently to focus more on the “team” aspect of education. What kind of culture are you attempting to build on your campus? What kind of people are you trying to form? That’s the purpose of education, not technical mastery (that comes later).

Having said that, even a group like YC could use a standardized test to accurately measure that intangible force behind grit/determination, the force that drives a person to be a creatively unstoppable force of success. Of even more value would be a measurement contextual to environmental factors: i.e., higher or lower scores depending on what kind of people you are surrounded by, what kind of tasks you are confronted by.

To do that you’d probably have to model (predict) society itself, and then you’d have implemented Foundation. In other words, this is a problem much harder than whether or not to use standardized tests for college applicants. We don’t know how to predict the future of individuals and societies. It may be impossible. But if you’re looking for an embarrassingly ambitious startup idea, this sure seems like a good candidate.

Ultimately this gives the admissions committee a lot less transparency in terms of whom they choose to admit.

In light of recent scandals, I am not sure that is a good thing. It may be well-intentioned today, but will ultimately be to the benefit of legacy and donor applicants, and to the detriment of others.

Perhaps Harvard with its endowment doesn't need the money and won't give in to the temptation, but this also sets the standard for other universities - and many of them could use the money.

I suspect this will help "privileged" kids more than disadvantaged ones. They have parents that can pull strings to get high school grades inflated or attend special schools for "bright" kids that inflate grades and have the support to get good extracurricular activities to appear well-rounded. And they have help writing college application essays, etc.

There's a lot of commentary here about larger trends towards not requiring the SAT, but Harvard says this isn't part of a larger trend. They just don't want to require students to go to a testing center in the middle of a pandemic, and nobody knows at this point what remote administration options will be available before 2021 applications are due.

As an Asian who went to an Ivy, I welcome this change.

Yes, it will mask a policy of keeping the proportion of Asians lower than a race neutral policy.

Yes, it's racially discriminatory.

Yes, it's somewhat unfair to Asians who are trying to get in.

But no, being fair isn't the point of these schools. Nor is having the most academically excellent student population. If you want that, go to Berkeley or CalTech.

The point is to provide an exclusive and desirable brand name. If the school ended up being 50% Asian like Californian colleges, it would be less diverse, less interesting place to go to school, and lose a lot of the cachet. I wouldn't want to go to a college that is 50% Asian and 1% black over a college that reflected the demographics of the country.

Asians parents need to learn that life isn't just about testing better and having a better resume. Their kids will learn that lesson later on in life but time they learned it earlier.

Yep, Asians need to learn how to play the race politics card. All those white politicians didn't get into the white house because they had good grades, but because they knew how to play to the crowd. In a democratic society, if you don't know how to get others to like you you'll always be screwed by someone who does. Remember, the employee that gets promoted isn't the one that works the hardest, but the one that their coworkers like the best. Reality isn't school, you aren't judged by the letters on a report card but how well you can navigate through a society made of other individuals. Whether that's by kissing up to white male bosses on wall street or being surrounded by minority activists on main street, social manipulation skills gives much more leverage than hard technical skills.

I think Asians also need to push back a little against the "there are too many Asians in tech" viewpoint. We face a considerable amount of racism and underpromotion (especially into management roles), but there is rarely any activism that's directed towards resolving these problems. A lot of initiatives I have seen in tech explicitly exclude Asians, so I'm wondering if there's initiatives directed at us.

Which kind of Asians are being under-promoted?

Satya, Sundar, Arvind?

Only East Asians are underpromoted. As and East Asian myself, I believe

(1) You should read this article and study: https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/indian-v-chine...

(2) there are plenty of Asians in tech. The real under presentation is in sports and entertainment. Yet no asian parents are lamenting that their kids didn't get an audition are they?

> Which kind of Asians are being under-promoted? Satya, Sundar, Arvind?

This rather specious argument comes up so often I am going to start calling it the "Satya-Sundar fallacy" (sorry Arvind!). Do you also dismiss the concerns of women not being promoted into management roles by citing the examples of Mary Barra and Marissa Meyer?

The US as a whole is very different from Silicon Valley. If the number of people making cow worship jokes at various jobs (here in the middle US) I have heard is any indication, I have a hard time believing they are also simultaneously giving Asians a fair shake at promotion.

Regarding your points – I do believe that East Asians are likely underpromoted relative to their number in tech. One question that's not covered in there is language – of my friends who are first-generation immigrants, the South Asian ones generally have better English than the East/South-East Asian ones.

> there are plenty of Asians in tech.

I...wasn't arguing otherwise. My point was about not being promoted as fast as their counterparts, and into management roles.

> Yet no asian parents are lamenting that their kids didn't get an audition are they?

I don't know about parents, but plenty of South Asian actors have had problems getting auditions. Read about how Kalpen Suresh Modi's auditions skyrocketed when he Anglicized his name to Kal Penn [1], and how Aziz Ansari has had trouble with roles where he's required to fake an accent [2]. East Asians have had a hard time with getting roles in movies that are about East Asians, which was why Crazy Rich Asians was such a landmark (in that it actually had an Asian cast). [3]

[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/obama/articles/2009/04/08/10-thi...

[2] https://ew.com/article/2015/10/25/aziz-ansari-transformers-a...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/movies/crazy-rich-asians-...

Women being promoted less has nothing to do with being under-promoted on purpose but more to do with women not asking enough for promotions and also willing to give credit to others instead of taking the credit themselves. And this is also not just true about women, it's also true for men who are shy or scared of speaking up for promotion. This applies to first generation immigrants too - often because they might be too self conscious of speaking up.

Companies don't simply give away promotions easily - you have to ask for it and also show why you deserve it. Otherwise whoever speaks up the most and is willing to ask for it gets it.

One thing I learnt at one of my work places from one of the senior managers was how to climb up the ladder. He said the most important thing is to keep a folder on your computer/email where you forward all customer emails who thank you for the outstanding job you did or coworker feedback on how helpful you are or team leader feedback on how awesome you have been. It's very similar to resume except this is the resume for climbing up the ladder at your existing work place. And ask for promotion as soon as you think you deserve it. Also be humble but don't be a door mat where you give away the credit of your work to someone else. Take credit yourself. I did these for many years and always climbed up. I also improved my english and got more confident at speaking up (I am a South Asian immigrant and could barely speak english when I first arrived).

Jordan Peterson's advice has helped me tremendously too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HqvbdOWpc8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6UKSLH8-ao

You accuse my argument ala the "Satya-Sundar fallacy" as specious because I use a few cherry picked examples to demonstrate demonstrate a general fact that isn't true? Also you suggest that language fluency might be a factor? Read the study [1]. Here's an abstract:

> Across nine studies (n = 11,030) using mixed methods (archival analyses of chief executive officers, field surveys in large US companies, student leader nominations and elections, and experiments), East Asians were less likely than South Asians and whites to attain leadership positions, whereas South Asians were more likely than whites to do so. To understand why the bamboo ceiling exists for East Asians but not South Asians, we examined three categories of mechanisms—prejudice (intergroup), motivation (intrapersonal), and assertiveness (interpersonal)—while controlling for demographics (e.g., birth country, English fluency, education, socioeconomic status). Analyses revealed that East Asians faced less prejudice than South Asians and were equally motivated by work and leadership as South Asians. However, East Asians were lower in assertiveness, which consistently mediated the leadership attainment gap between East Asians and South Asians. These results suggest that East Asians hit the bamboo ceiling because their low assertiveness is incongruent with American norms concerning how leaders should communicate. The bamboo ceiling is not an Asian issue, but an issue of cultural fit.

As for Hollywood - obviously there is plenty of discrimination based on names, accents, and much worse. My point is, if Asians tried as hard getting into Hollywood as they did in getting into Harvard, we would be in a completely different place right now. It's hard and unfair (just like getting into and ivy) but not impossible.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339227693_Why_East_...

> You accuse my argument ala the "Satya-Sundar fallacy" as specious because I use a few cherry picked examples to demonstrate demonstrate a general fact that isn't true?

Accuse is a strong word, but basically yes. Maybe it's a visceral reaction to something I have hear one too many times, that Asians don't face discrimination in tech because "Look at Satya and Sundar" (not exactly what you said).

But the point is that Satya and Sundar have little in common with the Midwest of America. Here, we can be shot by random guys in bars because they think we're Iranian [1]. You can guess that this kind of atmosphere might not correlate with a particularly equitable promotion process. If it helps, my intention is not to propagate a "woe is me" narrative, but to examine the possibility that Asians are treated differently (to their disadvantage) during promotion, just like other people of color.

Ironically, our discussion here and your linked study already led to a better insight than I had previously! As an admirer of Confucian values, it also makes me a little sad :|

Also, thanks for the study link! I see now that it was controlled for language, and consequently, my guess about language being a factor was simply wrong.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/world/asia/kansas-attack-...

> Here, we can be shot by random guys in bars because they think we're Iranian

Cherry picking a single occurrence where someone shot someone for racist reasons is not how science works plus this has nothing to do with the discussion.

Microsoft, IBM, Google, Adobe, Nokia, Harman, MasterCard and PepsiCo etc all have Indian (minority) CEOs. Apple has a gay CEO. Claiming there is some bias against minorities is absurd.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

whites kill whites, blacks kill blacks, asians and south asians kill their own.

> Claiming there is some bias against minorities is absurd.

Have a good evening, I guess :)

Are Asians treated worse during promotions because (1) the color of their skin / physical appearance (2) the confucian values (lack of assertiveness) of the individual (3) the stereotype of confucian values (lack of assertiveness) of Asians in general

I think it's more (2) and (3) than (1). It's hard being Asian - you have the weight of all other Asians practicing confucian values dragging you down.

Time to get rid of those values - If not for yourself then for others who don't want to be weighed down by the stereotype.

What benefit would there be to someone that adopts your proposed philosophy?

> I wouldn't want to go to a college that is 50% Asian and 1% black over a college that reflected the demographics of the country.

Did the Ivy you went to reflect the demographics of the country better than all other colleges?

Better than Berkeley or UCLA? Yup. I had a black roommate. Coming from Australia I had never met a black person in my entire life. I spent christmases with his family. You think I would have gotten that experience at Berkeley?

The problem with laying bare this purpose of these institutions is it destroys their credibility. If everyone knows it's just a social club, and that is formalized, it loses its prestige. It's beneficial to students who are enrolled due to family gifts that some students are enrolled due to being truly academically skilled. It furthers the impression the gift-giving segment may be skilled as well.

Hasn't this been the case for Ivies for generations? Maybe in the 20th century they moved away from the stereotype of East Coast prestige and old money to something more meritocratic, but that's probably been a few decades at best.

Again, it's the prestige of the social club that gives them credibility - not the academic excellence of its students. The students who have mediocre grades but very rich parents actually might actually have a better chance at success and bring more prestige to the university than the academically excellent student who have poor parents.

That might be too much of a reduction. You need academically successful members of your institution to get eye-popping headlines like "X discovered at University Y". Those PR pieces are partially responsible for the prestige. Concur on the point of family wealth helping institutions.

"X discovered at University Y" happens in graduate schools - not at the undergraduate level. And when you're admitting students in graduate school (excluding MBA and JD), you want the most academically successful members. There is no affirmative action for the physics Ph.D program at Harvard.

I agree with your perspective. Harvard is a brand name and that's what you pay for. The education is great, but then most accredited universities in the US will give you a quality education in your chosen field - especially the 4-year bachelor.

In fact, paying $85k/year is not worth any bachelor's degree if you are paying out of pocket for it (and God forbid you took out any student loans). If you have a full scholarship, go for it! If you are affluent enough to afford it, go for it! For the rest, go for a less expensive but still quality university - and the US is blessed with tons of those (heck you can even do a 2-year community college degree, which may be free in some states, and transfer credits to an affiliated university - and that still will net you a quality education in the US).

I dunno why race is the primary organizing principle for a college.

It's not.

The real question is why do people assume that academics the only factor in admissions?

As another Asian who kind of understands your viewpoint, I'm conflicted and unsure about this.

Us Asians are in a weird place, because as a statistic we're very successful, but also subject to a fairly wide range of discrimination inside and outside the workplace. We already a harder time breaking into "Good Old Boy" all-white institutions, and I have lost count of the number of casually racist anti-Asian things I have heard at my past few jobs.

> I wouldn't want to go to a college that is 50% Asian and 1% black over a college that reflected the demographics of the country.

I would disagree. IMO I'd rather see Harvard and the Ivies become 50% Asian, to drive home the point that there is nothing special about Harvard and it's just a name (as an example -- consider the other two schools you mentioned. Going to Berkeley or CalTech is still considered prestigious as hell). Life should be a holistic admission, but a lot of employers still use schools as a filter. So why should Asians be denied the opportunity to prove that that heuristic is imperfect?

Otherwise, Harvard will used as a filter that implicitly discriminates against Asians later in life. Think ”Oh he's from Harvard, good thing it's not one of those all-Asian colleges” which I'm sure is said behind closed doors in many rooms today and which you have perhaps benefited from.

Sorry you encountered racism. That sucks and hope you work with better people in the future. As someone who lives in the US but was raised in Australia, I have to say that I've encountered a lot more ignorance in the US but a lot less racism. I think it's getter better but probably not quickly enough.

> So why should Asians be denied the opportunity to prove that that heuristic is imperfect?

HAHA only Asians and rich white legacy parents would consider a rejection by Harvard to be a denial of opportunity worth complaining about. Harvard IS special BECAUSE of the name. Because it lends an air of prestige, legacy, and class that CANNOT be obtained by merely academic excellence. But just because it is special does not mean it has to provide an equal opportunity to all to obtain it by a transparent set of criteria. The frustratingly opaque unobtainability of the admissions to ivy is EXACTLY what gives it prestige and the exact reason why it cannot allow a fair academic process to determine admission.

> Otherwise, Harvard will used as a filter that implicitly discriminates against Asians later in life. Think ”Oh he's from Harvard, good thing it's not one of those all-Asian colleges” which I'm sure is said behind closed doors in many rooms today and which you have perhaps benefited from.

I went to Berkeley for grad school. Now I am a CTO at a company looking at resumes. I would hire a Berkeley grad over an ivy grad ANY day because I know how competitive and difficult the STEM programs at Berkeley are. The implicit presumption of superiority of an ivy degree over a Cal degree comes more from the mentality of the student body and the parents more so than from the employers. And with that I will venture to point out the ironic fact that Asians complaining about unfairness of Harvard admissions actually further highlights the fact that Harvard is more unattainable and thus desirable than other schools. The only thing that would really hurt Harvard is if Asians just said: "oh we don't want to get into those racist colleges anyway" .... but that would never happen :P

> I would hire a Berkeley grad over an ivy grad ANY day because I know how competitive and difficult the STEM programs at Berkeley are.

Well, that's good to hear. I guess I can only hope that a lot of employers think like you do!

> I went to Berkeley for grad school. Now I am a CTO at a company looking at resumes. I would hire a Berkeley grad over an ivy grad ANY day because I know how competitive and difficult the STEM programs at Berkeley are.

How many Berkley grads have you hired and have you tracked their actual job performance?

None. I've not hired many ivy grads either. Competition for devs is still hot and i've only been able to hire from community colleges.

And how are they performing?

Given my recent experience with quite a few graduates from all three schools you mentioned, I'll take a Berkeley or CalTech graduate over one from Harvard all else being equal. This would not have been the case 10 years ago, but in my observation the quality of the rigor of thinking from undergraduates coming from Harvard has slipped dramatically relative to these two other schools, especially as the most recent vintage of Harvard undergraduates increasingly tend to argue from emotion and feelings instead of reason compared to Berkeley and CalTech graduates.

100% agree.

In other words, they'll gladly accept heaps of additional application fee money while padding the "hardest college to get into" stats

I struggle to understand how this benefits applicants. So long as SAT/ACT is accepted at all, students should (and, mostly likely, will) continue to take them. This is a very obvious illustration of game theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma. [1]

Refusing to accept SAT/ACT scores would cause a profound change. Whether or not that is advisable is a separate discussion. The question begs, if we eliminate the SAT/ACT, and we decry GPAs as non-standardized, then what?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

I remain skeptical that admissions committees can distinguish between great students and good students through their personal statements. (Not that the SAT would have helped there either)

The objective here isn't to identify good students. That's just the cover story.

The objective is to select on criteria other than intelligence. For example, race.

Seems like a very idealogical thing to argue without evidence

You're not wrong. But there's no evidence arguing the contrary either.

“Not requiring” is about ratings. It allows schools to increase the amount of applicants making the school seem more selective. Meanwhile, they only report the test scores of good test takers, so the average increases too.

For a school like Harvard, once you’re in it’s hard to fail out. If you have a 4.0 GPA, the SATs won’t help you keep from failing. So better for them to only report the 1500s and not the 1300s.

What a weird way to attempt to be "egalitarian" - Harvard's only purpose is to be selective and exclusionary. You can't be both.

Harvard is selective and exclusionary but it doesn't need to select the objectively best people, it just has to select people that are "good enough". Most of the value of an undergrad degree at Harvard comes from networking rather than the education itself. It's a club.

(Unrelated, but I love, love, love your username.)

Thanks, I'm glad I took it.

It's just a music group.

Maybe they found that SAT/ACT were not good criteria for selecting the best candidates.

May or may not be related to the lawsuits they’ve been dealing with recently.

SAT/ACT tests provide "objective" data that can then be used in lawsuits to prove discrimination.

Can't win the lawsuit? Eliminate the proof!

They won the lawsuit...

You made me dig up some articles on this:

Harvard did win the bias lawsuit last year (october 2019): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/01/harvard-ruli...

The organization challenging this is still there: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/

Here's their latest complaint (march 2020): http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...

Their latest update links to this paper (april 2020): http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...

Don't forget that we're in a global pandemic that is severely limiting students' ability to take the test.

I am cynical enough to believe it's a loophole to keep overachieving Asians or Indians from owning a rightful slot instead of a son or daughter of a wealthy donor, politician, or celebrity.

Yup. The SAT exam fee is affordable (even if expensive) to everyday people. Other qualifications like intel science fairs, extra-curriculars, trips internationally, etc are all really expensive. As the child of middle-class immigrants from Asia, it's meant to keep people like me out, and instead select for the exclusive neighborhood I now live in and the Jones's who want to keep up. Great...

Why not both? Reconsidering the "rightful slots" of either group would diversify the institution significantly, though there are many who believe diversity is not beneficial. Perhaps Harvard sees a path to increased value in their endeavor to be more representative society.

Is "owning" a typo for "earning"? I don't see how anyone can own a slot.

To add to your cynicism, university exams started as way to select WASPy prep school students instead of "overachieving" Jewish public school students. See, the tests included a section on Latin, which was much more often taught in private prep schools than public high schools.

To detract from your cynicism, the intrinsic assumption is the SATs are meaningful indicator of "rightfulness."

My understanding is that at best it shows a correlation with the first year of college, and that high school grades show a better correlation than the (gameable) SAT.

Don't know if the WSJ article covers any of this - don't have a subscription. But the header suggests this change is only for the next year, as a response to the pandemic, and not (yet?) a long-term change, so it likely doesn't touch on these issues.

Agreed.

Would you have rejected a Harvard admit ? Are you just salty you didn't get in ?

Keyword seems to be require. I would think it’s still a factor. If you forego the tests you should be prepared to prove yourself by other means I guess. I wouldn’t take those chances though if I wanted in to Harvard. Although maybe I don’t understand the function of 21st century university anymore.

Harvard can be corrupt. There's a very average girl in my town who wouldn't get admitted to grad school at Harvard if her dad wasn't a law professor at Harvard.

Regarding asians. It's not about race. Diversity in academia is important for many reasons. It's not about being asian, it's about living in a rich family at a top school district, regardless of your race. A poor kid from a bad neighborhood cannot compete with that. The key is to find those who can close the gap. Taking someone's background into consideration is the right thing to do. There's some subjectivity in the process, so it's not ideal and someone would always be upset, but it's better than just looking at test scores.

To give you an example. I have friends who live at one of the top school districts in MA. In the last 3 years of their daughter's high school, they optimized her acceptance to college. Spending a lot of money on private lessons, making sure she volunteers in the right places since it looks good on the college application, paying money for a local expert to help her with the admission essay, etc. This is on top of the fact that she is already at a great high school who is optimized for getting its students into top schools.

"I have a very average girl in my town who got admitted to grad school at Harvard only because her dad is a law professor at Harvard."

I'm not saying Harvard isn't corrupt, but admitting professor's kid isn't really the best indicator of corruption. It's nothing unusual in many schools and they don't hide it.

I can understand the employment perk of making tuition free for employees' kids, but I'm less sure about reserving a slot. If I can make an analogy: as an employee of Verizon, I get a 50% discount on service, but when a new iPhone comes out, I'm not allowed to purchase it until after it's widely available.

I would think the child of a college professor likely already has an academic leg up on your average kid. Those kids maybe even more than others really should have to have the grades to get in.

I think a better analogy would be like a world class chef not wanting to feed their kids McDonald's.

Not hiding it doesn't mean it's OK. Maybe corrupt is not the right word but it's not that important. Things like this are exactly what people are talking about when they protest against privilege.

Harvard has 2400 professors and admits about 6000 students each year. Each professor might have a child that is at college age, but most won't. And parental admittance isn't a guarantee.

We're talking about a negligible number of students on this path weighed against the employee happiness and retention.

We're talking about someone getting something they don't deserve due to their birth alone. That kind of injustice doesn't last long in society without someone calling it out.

Have you considered that a professor's kid just might have picked up how to talk in a way that other professors like? That they might have learned how to work that is highly prized by academics?

Of course, none of this would be visible to a random dude from their hometown.

Applications are never just a perfect copy of you. You get to pick who writes letters of recommendation, you get to write the essays that frame and contextualize your successes and failures. Applying for things is a skill, and like all skills, it can be learned and improved.

Then quit it with the lie that any person in the US has the same chance of success. It's obvious that the only thing that matters is who your parents are and how much money they have, let's accept it for what it is and stop praising success like it means you're better than everyone else.

The total undergrad population of Harvard isn't even 7,000, so I'm not sure where you pulled the 6,000 number from. A quick look at their website will show you they admit around 2,000 per year.

I divided the total enrollment number from Google by 4. My investigation was not super thorough, I'm happy to correct it, though I think the point still stands.

I very briefly considered applying to MIT. I looked at application materials, and one of the questions was something to the effect of "What have you made/built that had impact on the world?" Knowing that I don't come from high society (both parents without college degrees), I knew I wouldn't have an interesting answer to this question relative to wealthy peers, and immediately bailed out on the process.

I know being defeatist isn't a winning strategy, but I guarantee you people won't even apply because they think their chances are so remote. And truthfully, I didn't need to go to MIT to have a successful career. I went to a less competitive institution that still offered a rigorous education. Career-wise, it has worked out.

> A poor kid from a bad neighborhood cannot compete with that

Yes. Exactly. You have no idea.

I went to a poor rural school. We had 0 AP classes. We did 0 ACT prep, wasn't even mentioned. I didn't even know you could retake it. We did not have air conditioning and the temperature outside would often reach 100 degrees. Kids would tear up the floor tiles and smash them against the blackboard in my math class.

It may be relevant that she got admitted as a grad student rather than undergrad. There are about twice as many grad students, and they get admitted by department rather than by the main admissions office. When I complained to my undergraduate advisor about how much work there was in a particular upper-level course, he scoffed: "The other students in that course went to undergrad elsewhere; you should be fine if you apply yourself." This professor certainly perceived a difference between the application processes of the two different groups.

There are two conflicting attitudes for Prestige universities

A) Ivies/Standford are better than regular universities because they have resources, powerful alumni and well connected students B) They should let XYZ in because they have great test scores

If B was really the most important A would no longer be true.

http://archive.is/mTOUo

It's amazing to me ivy league universities have done this in the face of uncertainty and extreme anxiety now that we have evidence that elongated sustained anxiety and chaos in one's life can reduce someone's IQ, I just didn't think they would be so blatantly obvious to do if when something globally devastating enough happened to be distracting to even rich white people as well, when students coming from poverty are dealing with distractions that are often worse regardless.

Sometimes it truly takes a rich white person to experience something before they believe it can happen to anybody else, and then they make a decision everyone else benefits from. Here's to new beginnings.

I'm curious how well rich white students who have never been exposed to chaos and uncertainty of this magnitude will fair in comparison to incoming students who have been dealing with it their whole life, a much better IMHO indicator for success in this "uncertain" times.

The only value colleges can hold comes from the rigor that ensures scarcity of degrees. Lowering the bar in a naive attempt to bring college to everyone only devalued the degree, and now we are seeing the slow decay of even our most prestigious universities.

No good will come from ignoring the natural distribution of intelligence.

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