The Tyranny of Merit
theprint.in
theprint.in
Wouldn't this mean if you compared two groups of kids from the same income quintile one with a very low SAT score and one with a very high one they'd have the exact same life outcomes? I find this hard to believe.
Also this study disagrees that coaching has much of an impact on SAT scores.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2pva2jus90c1el/2012-montgomery.pd...
Two wealthy kids, raised on the same neighborhood/conditions, measured with each other, SAT will give you a proxy for academic ability/IQ.
That comparison might break down when measuring A poor kid, with a wealthy kid. Or a ESL student (english as foreign language, to a native speaker).
The wealthy kids, probably went to better schools, had taken PRE-SATS since 8th grade, has tutor, and everything in between to get better. Poor kids are probably sharing a room with their parents, live in crappy conditions, and have to start working as teens to help out the family economically...
All upper middle class folks know this: the more testing practice you do, the better you become at that test...
SAT and IQ tests are a valid tool of measurement when two people have had the same conditions and training.
Let me translate into engineering terms: Two engineers go to interview, one is good and has some great experience, the other one is average, but just LEETCODES for months before the interview.
The average engineer gets the job, while the better one might not, as he probably didn't solve some Leetcode style of problem fast enough.
Im real life scenarios, the good engineer would have outperformed the average one.
Testing prep just doesn’t matter in aggregate, because admissions rarely have a cliff between marginal score and slightly better marginal score. Upper middle class people spending money on it doesn’t mean it’s money well spent; like many things rich people spend money on, it’s largely signaling to peers.
Also, your caricature of why people get hired for engineering jobs bears very little relationship to what I and my colleagues look for in engineering interviews.
Being able to solve a few simple algorithm problems is table stakes. Being able to talk about what you’re doing and why is what’s being measured.
People who crammed leetcode but don’t actually understand the material are obvious 5 minutes into the interview; people who freeze up occasionally on the algorithm bits but can talk about why they’re doing what they’re doing generally get hired.
Even for official IQ test taking, they don't recommend taking the test more than once a year, as it invalidates the results of the tests...
Why? The act of doing tests, makes you better at that particular test, and the test ceases to become a good measurement of what it was trying to measure (in this case, IQ).
Honestly I would be surprised if it was possible to create a test that was both impossible to improve with practice and actually measured anything at all.
Yeah, I'm not sure I've ever even heard of anyone comparing the times it took different applicants to answer a question, except maybe in the binary "did they do it under the time cap" sense. And even then, very rarely is software development time capped in the way an interview was so as long as someone's thinking is along the right track I don't think not getting a specific answer in a specific timeframe would disqualify them.
How far are we from trying to "correct"/normalize SAT scores according to family income quintiles? It seems to make sense if it's actually true that you can't compare scores across quintiles. As someone who did above-average and came from the bottom quintile it would have helped me a lot. As someone whose kids will very likely grow up in the top quintile I'm not sure I'd want that to happen.
What is a surprise is that the Ivy leagues and the wealthy are ashamed to admit this.
I think people wouldn’t get all worked up about this if people would be more honest.
Yes, there will always be some income differences, yes, some people self fragment into groups by race, class, interests, etc. when given a choice. What you see are natural consequences of people’s decisions.
I worry about the collateral effects of these attacks on meritocracy and the SAT. As immigrants, my family and I didn’t have social connections and deep cultural familiarity. Applying to college, doing the “right” extra-curriculars, etc., was actually quite a challenge. We never knew to work teachers for extra credit or retakes on exams to keep our grades up. What we had to distinguish ourselves from other upper middle class kids was our SAT scores.
Today, my wife and I have vastly more resources and cultural competency to navigate “the system” than my parents did. My kids go to a tiny K-12 private school where their teachers and guidance counselors will know them from preschool. We know the trendy extra-curriculars, how to craft admissions essays, how to put together class schedules that look good on a transcript while minimizing GPA risk, etc. I feel like deemphasizing the SAT and objective measures is going to help established families like mine at the expense of the kind of family I grew up in.
Still: your family was already well near the 75th percentile nationally for the time. In what sense would that not be wealthy?
As someone who attended an Ivy, it is simply untrue that it's mostly blue-blood old money hobnobbing around.
First, there's not enough of them to fill the classes every year. Second, wealthy people themselves want their children to be educated with other smart kids.
The stereotypes just don't fit and haven't for some time.
It was very much a surprise to me until I was like, 25-26 years old, which was when I really learned how the world works.
There's some very strong propaganda out there that you can do anything if you just apply yourself.
Heh, do people really fall for that? Even if the "can do anything" part is possible, it's not probable (compared to starting from a wealthy family and applying 1/10th the effort). Rich play life in easy mode, news at 11.
But business/academic success/jobs/monetary success/is...
Not saying there aren't great scholars coming out them.
The question is how good can educational institution get, when it is design to be a investment vehicle for the wealthy?
And I don’t know that we necessarily want to encourage people to “sacrifice their teenage years” by rewarding people who do so. I did well on the SAT, and I didn’t spend all my time partying. But I definitely don’t feel like I sacrificed my teenage years.
I certainly don’t want my children to look back on their childhood like that.
I believe earning some money for yourself as young kid (edit: specifically, I mean ~teen and later) is good, as it allows you to feel accomplished and teaches you to deal with money (ie. learning to save). It feels very different to do that with your own hard earned money than with pocket/birthday/clothing/allowance money. Not too much though, as the wage is ridiculously low, and the work likely repetitive and boring. It also teaches discipline.
And that last word, is a keyword to higher success, on top of money. You need both; not either.
Sorry, this is BS. I come from a competitive family. My parents put enormous pressure on me to do well in school, too. Pressure I could not handle. They wanted me to do 2 years in 1 to save 2k EUR on travel costs. I failed. If they had a tad bit more savings and listened better to me, I believe I would've succeeded. I'm good now, after a long struggle, but I should've learned a trait at age 12 instead. Not everyone is meant to take a traditional, higher education road to success. Not even when they have a high SAT score, or rich parents. Mine were average wealthy, though I had a chronically ill father. My cousins had no ill parent, and I suspect this is why they lack a general compassion for human beings in need.
Well it's kind of the same thing with university admissions. The problem that we've encountered is that the number of elite schools and admissions spots (established largely for the population of the post war growth economy) has not grown in proportion to the population. 1600 kids per freshman class has been the same for 30 years. And therefore the question of who gets in has gotten worse and worse as the number of kids competing has grown, and we're bickering over people's belief in different weighting schemes.
What the US needs is more good schools. Not tinkering around the edges and theoretical arguments of whether rich kids deserve good schooling more than poor kids. That will get us nowhere in the big picture.
We /do/ have major problems with offering alternatives to a given location, though.
In 2019 the US spent roughly 720 billion on the military.
Public spending on elementary and secondary (high schools) was about 740 billion. That doesn't count all spending on public colleges or any spending on private schools both of which are substantial.
Even if you just add the VA into the mix your numbers come out upside down. Add any segment of Homeland security and it gets really obvious fast.
If we include all of both of those (and I would contend that "all" isn't really appropriate if we're just talking about the "military") we're around a trillion or so on the military.
Let's take the 740B on government spending on primary + secondary education and add the 175B or so spent by various levels of governments on college. That gets you to 915B. Is there 100B of private spending a year on education? I'm willing to bet there is.
At the end of the day, the numbers are probably pretty close. My overall point is that there is this idea that US military spending dwarfs US education spending. However you do the math, this is clearly not the case.
I like the idea from the powerball revolution epsiode of Revisionist History (http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revo...). Why not have some filter to get the top students in to a pool, then randomly select them? I mean there are more qualified students than there are slots, so it's only "fair" if each of them get the same chance. No politics - just a pure number game at that point. You can argue the filter could create a disadvantage to poor students etc..., but you can adjust that in ways that the initial pool of potential applicants will be even.
Of course when I mention the concept of randomly selecting a candidate, it makes people real uncomfortable :)
economies of scale work to your advantage here as well. when hiring 1 person, you feel immense pressure to hire correctly. but when hiring for 10 similar roles, you can, for instance, hire 11 people at random from a qualified pool and find the best fits along the way (often even for the 'extra' hire, who might fit in an entirely different role).
I agree and think the brokenness is in the limited number of opportunities. Why are Harvard and other Ivies the only ones that matter on your resume? Once a society limits the number of opportunities to reach the upper echelons, it is bound to set off scramble among all the parents, since everyone wants the best for their children.
For some reasons, this is not only an American thing. I believe elite institutions in other countries as equally (or even more) selective.
Like having google on your resume.
It's not logical. If someone left google after a year.. it sounds like it wasn't a great fit for either but others will take it as a proxy for your greatness and select that person over someone who stayed longer at a less known entity.
And why can't you select a the best students and then randomly select among them? I don't believe that a 3.8 student will certainly perform worse than a 3.85 student, for example.
This is demonstrably untrue. First, the article’s use of a family making $200,000 is telling. If you look around that people who are billionaires today, most did come from upper middle class families, but not necessarily wealthy ones. Mark Zuckerberg’s parents are a psychiatrist and a dentist. Opening wide the class of the most elite to the children of upper middle class professionals is in fact a huge societal achievement. Few societies have that kind of mobility.
Another example is the economic mobility of Asians raised in the bottom 20% of income. These people lack both financial resources and social connections. But they have a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income as adults. Test-based meritocracy like the SAT is a huge enabler of that.
I have trouble agreeing with that, especially given the tendencies of pulling up the ladder. The billionaires are basically irrelevant because they're too small in number, the upper middle class and everyone else is the chasm that is widening by the day [0]. It's absolutely becoming or has become a stratified structure.
It's an easy trap to fall into because the word it thrown around as a universal bad label, but I don't know why. I fundamentally don't understand what's wrong with inequality (and again, I grew up with hand-me-down clothing, eating a lot of sausages and potatoes :)). Other than the practical stability concerns, I think meritocracy has a moral dimension - you get what you deserve; whereas inequality has no moral dimension whatsoever.
IMO everything should work like sports (with different curves, e.g. by the numbers, we need more surgeons than NFL quarterbacks). At 9, everyone can play soccer or football with pretty much equal opportunity and resources (and if not, this is what we should fix). By high school, some people drop off because they have no interest or talent, and the investment in other kids by the coaches/etc. skews towards the promising kids. By college, the teams are hunting for specific talented kids, and resources (scholarhip, team spots, etc.) are much more concentrated. And only few, in a pretty rigorous meritocracy, make it to the NFL.
If someone has no talent/grit/muscles to play decent football, we don't think it's "bad" "inequality" that they didn't make it to the NFL. If someone has no talent/grit/IQ to learn to develop software it's not "inequality" they are not in a FAANG. If someone has little talent/grit/... at anything, why is it suddenly "unfair" that they cannot get anywhere?
When I started at university (in the uk, top 10 but not top 5), the admissions tutor (for the school of physics, not the whole place) who admitted my year group was forced to do the job. He considered himself a scientist (he was an FRS, a leader in his field after all). He looked at all the factors used for entry and found them all to be bs. Grades (predicted and actual), personal statements, references, extra curriculars, age/gender/socioeconomic group etc.
So he admitted everyone that applied.
He admitted people with low grades, he admitted people without the maths requirements (usually the most important grade for a physics under grad, you generally can't do any physics course without one).
The result was a bumper class of 120ish instead of the usual 60ish. But by the end of the first year / start of second year, we were down to the usual number. Everyone else had transfered out, failed and left or was repeating the year.
The interesting thing was that there were a few of the people who wouldn't usually have made it who did not transfer out. 2 of the 10 without the maths qualifications went on the get degrees. 1 is a teacher, the other got a PhD.
His philosophy was that if someone could pass first year exams, labs, etc they deserved a spot in second year and so on. He didn't care what they came with. Just whether they passed. The chance he gave people was mostly wasted. But not entirely. He radically improved some people's lives.
I only know because we got drunk together because he was my tutor and we had a very friendly tutorial group and relationship.
As a straight A student with good extra curriculum activities, references, even work experience, I was scandalised and insulted to hear what he'd done. But I learned new definition of equality and it challenged me as a person. I think a lot of schools in particular work the other way around: hard to get in, then you just sit there for a few years and walk into jobs without further examination. That helps no one.
Some one that does well, in a community college, should be transfered into a proper 4 year college. I know a lot of state schools do this, but it should be more common/normalized.
Plus community colleges tend to be much cheaper.
As far as I know, this is radically common. Where are you from that this isn’t common? Most everyone goes to community college as prep for getting a four year degree later or do some particular 2 year program. I rarely meet people who do a two year associates just for the sake of it. (As it usually means very little in the marketplace) Usually the people who quit at two years never really could figure out what they wanted to do. (Which is fine)
Isn't this kinda obvious?
I mean, if you have parents that can teach you stuff or pay someone to teach you additionally to the stuff you learn at school you'll always fare better.
I don't think there can be a way to measure any kind of aptitude independently from your upbringing. We don't need better tests, we need to help parents to raise better children.
* SAT scores are highly correlated with intelligence
* Intelligence is highly correlated with wealth
* Intelligence is highly heritable (80% apparently)
Why start the article off with an obvious falsehood? The fact that SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth does not mean that none of the variation in scores is explained by aptitude.
When people make the argument in this article they never seem to propose a fairer alternative. I'm suspicious that the criticism of SATs is actually a movement towards returning to patronage and nepotism.
My family could have afforded prep courses, but I wanted to prove to myself that it could be done for much less (which it was).
Please don't avoid applying to a school just because you assume you won't be offered enough aid.
Also, if an aid package doesn't work for you, please call the aid office to explain your situation. Tell them you want to attend, but money is the only barrier. They will work with you.
Just because you can get a loan to cover the cost doesn't mean it's affordable.
I've noticed a definite difference between lower and middle income people in this regard.
People without much income, "working class" if you will, view loans as "something to help make ends meet"
More middle and upper-middle class people view loans as "access to cheap credit." I.e. ways to leverage a little excess money into a lot of excess money.
The main difference is the level of confidence that the leverage isn't going to turn on you and flip your life upside-down because you can't make the payments.
It is incredible any family says no to a top tier college program for any reason. It’s like winning the lottery. Taking out federal loans to pay to go to Cornell is still a fantastic deal, as long as you study the right things, even considering the loans are mispriced due to all the people who do not pay them back.
It’s just basic arithmetic, so I cannot believe that the obstacle for families is knowledge of how the system works. Something else is always at play when people make completely drop dead stupid financial decisions, things that are usually personal and ancestral, deep problems that cannot be solved by arithmetic. On the financial flip side it’s also why people go into dentistry - the arithmetic is terrible considering how much dental school costs, but something about the relationship between the family and the kids is coercing kids into dental school anyway. This is not an unorthodox opinion.
* There's a caveat that for those in the lowest incomes, attending mattered. I wonder if this is due to a networking effect rather than the quality of the school
MIT:
> Six out of every 10 students receive MIT need-based aid. the average price paid by an undergraduate receiving financial aid in 2019–2020 was $21,917—that’s approximately what it costs to attend a state school. And for students with family incomes under $90,000 a year, we ensure that scholarship funding will allow them to attend MIT tuition-free.
Harvard puts the following numbers front and center:
20 % of Harvard families pay nothing
55 % receive Harvard scholarship aid
12 K average parent contribution
100 % of students can graduate debt-free
Can graduate debt-free, or do actually graduate debt-free?
This also seems to ignore parental debt. Many parents cannot afford to pay $12K a year (or more) and have to take out home equity or other loans in order to pay the parental contribution that the university financial aid office decides upon.
Does this include graduate and professional students?
And what about "big-name" schools that don't have Harvard's $41B endowment? Some monetarily "poorer" ivies (Dartmouth and Brown) have endowments that are tiny by comparison (though $6B or $5B isn't exactly chump change. Also they had terrific returns of 8% and 12% for 2020.)
What does this say about people like me? Am I on a lower track for life now? *Feels like people like me are underrepresented in conversations like this!
Edit: Not to be misleading - I hadn't been accepted as I never applied. The below replies are based on talks with recruiters prior to applying, which I ultimately never did.
But no, I try to have no regrets. I know enough people saddled in student loan debt who didn't get their big shot. As an introvert, I could see that being me as I probably wouldn't have networked adequately. Then there's the whole fact that I would not have my wife and daughter likely. Very Butterfly Effect like thinking.
I find school's love to offer loans.
The correlation between SAT and wealth is not surprising. Wealth and g-factor are also correlated. In addition, g-factor of parents is extremely highly correlated to that of their kids through both genetics and upbringing. That there exists a transitive correlation between all of parental wealth, child-g, parental-g, and child-SAT is totally expected from our understanding of intelligence in the literature. Wealth as a driver independent of g needs to be explicitly tested for in a multivariable model (has this been done?).
These people are the gatekeepers to a higher education, they should be held to higher standards.
> The college counselors' report concludes that, on average, prep courses yield only a modest benefit, "contrary to the claims made by many test-preparation providers." It found that SAT coaching resulted in about 30 points in score improvement on the SAT, out of a possible 1600, and less than one point out of a possible 36 on the ACT, the other main college-entrance exam, says Derek Briggs, chairman of the research and methodology department at the University of Colorado in Boulder and author of the admissions counselors' report.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
> Once scholars control for all these factors as best they can, they find that coaching has a positive but small effect: Perhaps 10 or 20 points in total on the SAT, mostly on the math section, according to careful work by Derek Briggs of the University of Colorado Boulder and Ben Domingue of Stanford University.
> Some estimates run a little higher: A 2010 study led by Ohio State’s Claudia Buchmann and based on the National Education Longitudinal Study found that the use of books, videos, and computer software offers no boost whatsoever, while a private test prep course adds 30 points to your score on average, and the use of a private tutor adds 37.
Based on info from a buddy of mine who runs an SAT prep business, this is a half truth. He says:
- It is tough to get gains from a kid who doesn’t want to be there — that is, the parents are pushing the students to prep when the student doesn’t want to. My friend actually tries to filter out these folks in his sales funnel.
- Motivated kids can get ridiculous amounts of improvement (40-100 per skill), especially if they are starting off in the lower or middle part of the scoring range (people at the top are capped in improvement by max scores).
- I have done some minimal tutoring for a friend’s kid, and his SAT score went up by 110 in math and 80 in verbal from a middling starting point. Anecdote, but still... My “curriculum” was just have him take a practice test every week under test like conditions, review the principles behind the math problems that he missed, review any test strategy issues that pop up, and give him 50 vocab words a week with skills on how to search for how these words are used in a natural setting. With a longer runway, I think he may have been able to double that improvement (the kid was smart enough to get a perfect math score, but didn’t have the confidence to execute in a testing context).
Parents who sent their kids to cram school, or tutoring or whatever, and kids with perfect scores are mad that schools aren’t basing admissions solely on scores and grades.
What it boils down to is that Asian American kids are outperforming most other groups on the SAT for whatever reason. Elite colleges don’t want student bodies that are 70% Asian American.
Also, middle schoolers don’t really have a choice in the matter. If it were up to them, they’d play Roblox and watch TikToks all day.
And it should be noted that they changed the tests before these studies too.
> Many of the key studies of coaching effects were based on kids who took the SAT or ACT in the 1990s and 2000s, Briggs told me. The tests have since been changed a fair amount, in an effort to make them more like statewide achievement tests and to minimize their similarity to intelligence tests.
For example, looking at specific question formats; learning the only topics that would be covered by tests and nothing else.
That’s all the referenced studies show.
That doesn’t mean that the SAT isn’t “coachable” with much intensive efforts, or that more minimal efforts don’t result in large improvements for some subset of test takers.
"The SAT isn't gameable" is an extraordinary claim. And "suburban families try hard to game the SAT" is not so much a "claim" as "a fact your own analysis acknowledges". I could be persuaded, but what you've presented here doesn't constitute extraordinary evidence.
(Your other argument in this thread, about the possible Cobra Effect of eliminating the SAT, is much more persuasive).
2. What those studies call coaching isn’t remotely comparable to years of 20 hour a week cram school.
3. Of course the SAT is coachable. How do you think you learn the math techniques and vocabulary in the first place?
If it’s not possible to increase your vocabulary, how do people learn new languages?
4. The percentage of students who make a perfect score on a similar test, the ACT, has increased by 5x in the last five years while the average score has only risen slightly.
Clearly a subset of test takers has figured out a way to reliably prep for the test.
The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374289980/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc...
I've talked to several people about my profile for grad school and the consensus is it's not good enough given my undergrad stature. I've talked to folks from schools like CMU and UIUC who got into elite grad schools without papers or ~3.9+ GPAs, but I'm already out of the running with these things with a degree from NC State.
It's incredibly depressing to know I'm already shut out of most forms of social mobility at 24!
If you’re wanting to go to grad school, go to grad school. Maybe you don’t go to an Ivy, but if you’re after the grad school experience then an Ivy is a nice potential bonus, not a necessary thing.
That only tends to be true for PHD programs where the student is expected to work on research that actually brings in grant money.
That's not true for all grad programs. Some are not research-focused at all, and for those the student usually has to pay their own way or get other forms of financial aid (which not all students qualify for).
Even if they do qualify for financial aid, they might not get any, if the limited amount that is available has already been given out to other qualified students.
It may just be “pay them a living wage!”. Pay them $75,000 and call it a day. The waived tuition cost is BS. They aren’t undergrads living on campus and taking a half dozen classes. It doesn’t cost $50,000 / year to have a PhD student do lots of work for the school. Quite the opposite! The school makes a lot of money of their labor!!
At least for STEM PhDs at research universities.
- For the most part, high SATs are tables stakes for applying to elite schools, they are not the deciding factor. The exceptions are for athletes and other folks with preferred admissions. I don’t know why people continue to think that great grades and high SAT scores are the main or only factors in elite school admissions — the admissions materials themselves make it abundantly clear that they are looking for more.
- All that said, the “more” mentioned above is typically easier to access if you come from a high income family.
- The excerpt mentions low % of students who go from bottom quintile to top quintile after an elite education (~2%). Is that 2% of the total student body or 2% of the bottom quintile elite school students? This is unclear to me, but if it’s the former, that’s probably a big win since lowest quintile students are a small part of the student body to begin with.
- Note that some (many?) jumps from bottom quintile to top quintile may just be a well-off family that ran into bad times. This happened to a friend of mine — wealthy family one generation, the next generation lost it to drugs and alcohol, and the third generation reverted back to wealthy.
- The leap from the bottom quintile to the top typically requires much more than education. There are a ton of soft skills that are common in the top quintile that are foreign or antithetical to people from the bottom quintile —- general communication, conflict resolution, attitudes towards money, socializing skills, etc. Without these skills, it’s really tough to make it to the top quintile unless you effectively hit the time-in-history and degree lottery with a FAANG-type of high paying job. Even then, someone from the bottom quintile will have limited upside without the soft skills mentioned above.
- To close, I wish people would stop presenting elite schools as the gateway to riches or even a stable high income. Learning how to play the “game” that the top quintile plays is much more important than where someone went to school. Obviously schooling (esp. elite schooling) is part of that game, but based on the wide variety of winners in the game that I have known, the soft skills I have mentioned are a much more common and salient trait than an elite schooling.
I know a (formerly) middle class guy who was a walk-on football player at a big Midwestern state university who wanted to be rich. He did not come from an area or a family who knew how to function gracefully in the eight-figure net worth NE corridor crowd.
He parlayed his varsity status (I call it a totally-not-a-club club) into a random low level back room finance job in NYC. He made himself useful, socialized, networked, learned from those around him, and after two decades or so (leaving out a lot of the story) he was a partner of a hedge fund that ended up netting him a mid-eight-figure net worth.
Granted, that is not the same as jumping from the bottom quintile, but knowing his personal story, he had plenty of social challenges to overcome.
I'm far from being rich, but I plan to pick a private but modest school / university for my children. Even if I were multimillionaire I wouldn't change this.
My rationale is:
- I don't want to deal with underpaid and possibly bitter public school teachers
- It's not like you need an ivy school to find a job or be successful, that lies within you
- Education is as useful as your kids will have a passion for, not how much you pay for an oversized planetarium
- Rich kids sound like the worst people to surround your kid with
I'm genuinely a little confused by this sentence. You lay out your reasons below, but seem to be assuming you get to pick. By the time someone attends university, they're usually, you know, people. Adults in the 18+ sense, high school diploma, ability to get a job, have their own opinions about the world, access to federal student loans, etc. You'll have some influence in terms of the degree to which you'll support their decision and advice you can offer, but you don't get to pick anything, especially if your child is talented/driven enough to get into an Ivy League w/o being a socioeconomic outlier.
University will be their choice but - assuming I'll be the one to fork out money for uni - I will set a budget.
Every time a game is released or a new patch changes the mechanics, a game is in a state of flux.
New models are tried out, new build orders, and it’s more random, people experiment.
Eventually though, the optimal strategy or set of strategies are known - the meta.
It results in many striking metaphorical similarities
1) not following the meta gets you abuse in team games, and is generally going to be suboptimal.
2) the meta is not about fairness. If there is an unfair mechanic, well you had best be executing it better than the competition
3) the meta rewards people who can follow and execute, and significantly less towards experimenting new approaches. The game has only so many degrees of freedom so it’s not like there is much more you can do better than the meta.
4) related to 1, everyone does the meta. It’s the way to play.
Eventually things get stale and boring, and only people who can Stomach/enjoy the meta get ahead.
This I believe is the crux of the problem in how the "upward mobility" is measured. If it is strictly by income/wealth quintiles, then it is strictly zero-sum. But is the world really a zero-sum game? I'd content that 80-90% people in USA / Western Europe have a far superior quality of life than the top-1% of the past on many metrics like health, nutrition or peace. So one can say that their entire societies were upwardly mobile from 1946 onward.
Everyone talks about upward mobility, but we rarely talk about downward mobility. It's not impossible to go from "rags to riches", but who ever goes from riches to rags? It's not a true "meritocracy" unless the system reliably impoverishes the idiot children of the wealthy, but that almost never happens. The wealthy are protected, regardless of merit, and they take up space at or near the top of the system, reducing the number of positions open to more qualified candidates.
While I agree that the idiot children of the wealthy should not get to wield any significant influence on the society, "impoverishing them" doesn't seem like the right goal, since that might provoke a reaction from their wealthy parents who are driven, connected and talented. Rather, such idiots should be managed out on a safe landing, where they don't influence society at all but their parents are still not worried about their future.
I don't think anyone should be impoverished, and indeed I'm not a supporter of the idea of "meritocracy", but I think it's fair to take the arguments for it to their logical and abhorrent conclusion. After all, the supporters seem perfectly content to allow the non-wealthy (and assumed non-meritorious) to become impoverished.
It matters when elite admissions favor legacy students, athletes, and those with unique extracurricular activities. All of which favor the rich.
The obvious solution to the elite getting more opportunities is to increase the availability of it across the board to narrow the gap so others can meet their potential as well - meritocracy isn't guaranteed callous social darwinism.
The only logical reason I can see is not wanting competition from those better.
To explain: it’s simply a fact in our current society that people with wealth have outsized power and influence, even if they do not have special aptitude.
In a society where wealth does accumulate, it seems beneficial for people with aptitude but not wealth to be able to build relationships with people who have wealth but not aptitude.
Thus, society benefits from colleges admitting a mixture of the two.
Why did it omit a whole swath of information in order to make a point?
How does the outcome of elite grads compare with those from public universities? Second tier colleges?
As for social background, yeah, the wealthier you are, the easier it is to move to a good district. Yet, within a single school district, what difference would social background make?
But the overall thesis is sound: in a merit-based system, parental wealth can still convey major advantages
Even in the absence of SAT prep courses and private tutors, children of wealthy parents are likely to enjoy better nutrition, better health, better schools, etc..
(Remember that meritocracy was invented as a dystopian term rather than something positive.)
He describes getting help from Amy Chua his professor who also has a lot to say about success in America - see her books Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom and more recently Political Tribes
They only offer financial aid. It is a distinct application process (at least was was I applied). But that financial aid is extremely generous. I.e. you can have family income of over 100K and still qualify.
A high school friend who went to an Ivy missed this part. She thought that not offering merit scholarships meant you couldn’t get any money to reduce the cost.
Because of this, high achieving, middle class students often go to state schools, which often give merit scholarships (top-20 schools don't), and have much lower tuition.
Some people have already pointed out that top tier universities have been discounted for the last decade. But even in 2000, Harvard college cost less than half of what it does now. Taking out loans to pay for Havard in 2000 would be the best investment you could ever make in your life, just considering that same inflation that partly raised Harvard’s tuition price also reduced the real cost of your debt.
I believe the underlying problem is not financial literacy though.
Admissions to the top 5 schools are broken. There’s more qualified students than there are slots. The only solution to that is more slots.
If you get a 1500 on your SAT that’s a free ride to almost any university in the country. Especially if you come from an under-represented background. This includes Ivy League schools. But not Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT.
The best ticket to a top 25 world class education is a high SAT score. It’s a free ticket available to anyone.
I have many complaints about our university. But even a mediocre test score gets you a free ride to very very good state schools. Articles like this only reinforce the false necessity of Top 5 or Top 10 status.
A bit OT, but: I was going to say that the 1600 point scale hasn't been used for years (since 2005, when they switched to a 2400 point scale), but it turns out that they went back to the 1600 point scale in 2016.
A perfect 1600 won’t get you into top 10 schools on its own. Thus my original comment about there being more qualified candidates than openings.
I mean, I didn't. I get what you're saying but the idea that you can just "work hard" to get into these sorts of institutions feels kind of insulting when there are lots of people like me that did work hard but didn't get in.
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-scores-for-colleges
The highest average SAT score at the top schools is right around 1500.
I’m not saying a 1500 will get you into Harvard. It won’t. But it will get you into a very good school. University of Washington is a great school. It’s average SAT score is just 1340. 75th percentile is 1460.
1500 is literally top 2% of score distribution. For most circumstances that should get most people into a top 5% school. (Top 5%, not Top 5).
A 3.81 GPA and a SAT score of 1540 were enough to get me a full ride at a decent school in the UT System (not Austin, though).
in this fancy socialism-is-the-future era, our system now punishes "the evil rich" to make sure we are all going to have 'equity-result', as said the 'road-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intention', guess what, those true 'bad' rich family always knows how to circumvent any rules that is targeting them, in the end it's always the honest hard-working high-income family got punished.
saying rich-family is key to elite university, is the same as saying exercise-person lives longer, the 'rich' or 'exercise' are nothing to blame most of the time.
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries"
this kind of report is absolutely trash.
I came from a well off family (who were on food stamps when I was first born — socialism FTW), and had tons of advantages while I meandered through college before eventually graduating. I was not overly disciplined but had many extra chances someone from less means would not have.
so the trend now becomes 'equity result', which will make nobody wants to work hard anymore, that's socialism at its worst.
this is also called mob to the hard working "rich" families.
US is moving to that direction, fast.
by the way, I was from a poor family, and now barely made it.
I would rather keep working my way up instead of seeing socialism-for-equity-result here.
I also hope for those who depends on food-stamp and now is in good shape, donating to the community, and always be thankful to other taxpayers who gave you and your family a hand, money is not from air, it's from other working persons' pocket.
Do you have a source for this? I'm very very left I haven't seen something like this being promoted anywhere.
> US is moving to that direction, fast.
No, it isn't. The current president is Donald Trump for crying out loud. It can barely even get less in that direction.
> I would rather keep working my way up instead of seeing socialism-for-equity-result here.
Why should people be required to artificially "keep working hard" if there's enough resources to not?
> money is not from air
It certainly is though.
I'm all for splitting US into left and right states, a reverse of civil war but without the war. The nation is nearly split into 50:50 anyways in the last few decades and it's getting more and more divided. Both sides will be happy, and we can compete in parallel and see which system will win. This way, at least, those leftism will not fight for liberal agenda with money from other hard working people's pocket. Please leave them alone, they're already taxed enough and did their share for your dreaming welfare society.