Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite | Hacker News Reader

Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite

nytimes.com

16 pointswallflower26 comments

The article title isn't very informative; you might as well say, "Elite colleges, largely for the top." Elite how? Academically? Income? Family connections?

The real injustice, IMO, isn't in the higher education system. It's in the public K-12 system. I didn't attend a private high school, but I might as well have---my parents live in an area with sky-high property values, and the high school I attended solicits citizen donations pretty vigorously. I think we had maybe three black kids in the school, and I'm sure our graduation rate was over 90%.

I have a very hard time believing that Joe Inner City had a chance of getting the same secondary education I did.

I don't know what the solution is, but I'm pretty sure it starts way before college.

I don't know what the solution is, but I'm pretty sure it starts way before college

I'd be inclined to segregate the schools. No, not by race, by IQ scores. Test the kids at the age of ten and split 'em up into (say) five groups depending on how well they do, and then truck 'em off to schools strategically placed to have catchment areas spread over a range of socioeconomic areas.

The alphas would get the full-on deal, the best education that our species can cram into seven short years. The betas would get a slightly easier set of coursework but still be expected to be fully functional and capable of office work. The epsilons would get remedial literacy and life skills and taught to productively follow orders in order to make it through life without becoming a burglar or meth addict. It may sound cruel, but is it any worse than expecting an IQ 80 doofus to write an essay on Shakespeare?

Well, you could argue that some "IQ segregation" already happens, by virtue of having highly selective private schools, advanced placement, etc.

I think the students (or parents when they're too young) should have choice though, and be able to choose how challenging they want their education to be. With high-priced private schools, this is not really the case though.

"They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard." -Brave New World

That's sort of how it worked in Germany when I grew up there. At age 10 everyone gets a series of tests that decides whether they go to first, second or third tier schools. Only the first tier (9 years of high school) gets you admission to university. The second tier is meant to shuttle you toward vocational education, which is very good in Germany, and the third tier basically turns you into a laborer.

There is some lateral movement between schools but it's pretty rare and in most states the schools are physically separated.

I'm not sure what it's like now but at the time it seemed like the system didn't really sort by IQ but much more by the class you were already in. In principle it should be easy to move up but the reality is much different.

10 is way too late: take a look at Harlem Children's Zone, and "Baby College". You have to start with prenatal care and parent education to really make a difference.

Then there are schools like Little Rock Central (which I use as an example merely because I'm familiar with it). They routinely pump out national merits and presidential scholars. The quality of the education, if you choose to engage in it, is through the roof.

Of course the bulk of their students choose the wrong route. I do wonder if there is a model tucked away in that school, however. They seem to do a really good job of helping their brightest students succeed. I'm not really familiar with what they do, but I'd be interested to know more for sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Central_High_School

Bourdieu would say (in his ridiculously convoluted french way) that modern capitalism maintains a class system via inculturation at the family/ childhood level, where a lifetime of test scores and social skills is grooved into a person and determines the rest of his life chances.

This allows us to pretend that the current class system is due purely to fair competition between adults by not looking into the family and the school system, while at the same time ensuring a steady stream of disadvantaged to work in the factories and kill themselves buying junk food, beer, and cigarettes. And the few that climb out are considered the evidence that "anybody" could do it, "if they really tried" -- hogwash!

It's a little bit more fair -- and a lot more complicated and subtle -- than when William the Conqueror came over, pointed a sword at the local Anglo-Saxons, and said basically "You will be a peasant or I will kill you and your family. That's fair, don't you think?" Of course the Anglo-Saxons did this to the Celts and the left-over Romans, etc, etc, etc.

So, no, its not a fair world. Marx was super naive about socialism, but he was a great historian, and he said "History is the history of class struggle". Not quite that simple (Marx, like us all, loved his simple answers), but one should look for the class struggle angle in every situation.

But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. It’s pretty hard to call that meritocracy.

Wait, isn't that exactly a meritocracy? An applicant's chances of getting in are correlated with his SAT score and not with his income?

Ha, literally came here to copy/paste this exact thing. I am hoping this is an editorial oversight, because any other explanation would be disturbing.

I think he misused meritocracy; I think he was looking for `plutocracy'.

Isn't plutocracy even farther in the wrong direction? His point is that colleges are trying to reward the poor, not the wealthy, but are failing to do so. Maybe "ptochocracy" or "egalitarianism"?

I'd agree that the wording is pretty strange, but I would argue that if two applicants are exactly the same in every way, except that A's parents make $40,000/year and B's parents make $500,000/year, A should be ranked above B in terms of merit because more than likely he/she has experienced more hardship, and been able to do just as well as B in spite of it.

I do think that's what the author meant. I see the point, but on the other hand, it seems extremely hard to measure and account for. Unless the difference is abysmal, I don't think it would be right to discriminate based on socioeconomic background either.

Besides, in what sense is the "merit" conferred by having good genes better than the "merit" conferred by having rich parents?

Via blind luck, person A happens to be born slightly smarter than person B, but with poorer parents. Person B is genetically disadvantaged relative to person A, but has a few more learning opportunities in childhood. By the time they both reach the age of eighteen, they're performing identically on the SAT (which is supposed to be a test of general intelligence). Why should we say that A's unfair genetic advantage is more meritorious than B's unfair financial advantage?

Merit isn't necessarily free of any "luck" component. I would say that a smarter person "merits" admission over a less smart person, even though the smarter person didn't really earn the intelligence in any way because he/she was born with it.

If you want to get into a debate on whether intelligence gives a person merit, you might as well ask whether being hard-working gives a person merit too, since being hard-working probably also has a genetic component. If you're a determinist, you could even extend this further by saying that everyone has the exact same merit, in that nobody had any control over anything they did, good or bad.

The SAT can be tutored (and is). Lower income students can't afford this tutoring, so on average and on a purely economic basis you would expect that higher income kids achieve higher scores than lower income ones.

You'd expect higher income kids to achieve SAT scores 30 pts higher than lower income students (and untutored higher income kids).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html

"Children of alumni received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even bigger advantage..."

You completely ignored the context of the statement. Instead, you created a strawman argument and ignored that other groups such as minorities and athletes are given advantages in the application process, yet a group that is inherently disadvantaged gets no preferential treatment.

You also ignore the paragraph before that which begins: "...SAT scores are hardly a pure measure of merit." You took a lone statement out of context and then hammered it, when, in context, it deserved none of the scrutiny leveled upon it.

They have an odd definition of "elite" (top 1/4)... That's what, household income in the ~$100k range for a family that has college-aged kids? That's pretty much every household with at least one parent with a professional job (especially on the east coast, where I'd imagine most people at Georgetown are from).

What, the NYT's "elite" isn't elite enough for you? That sounds a bit elitist, doesn't it?

Nationally, only about 27% of the population above the age of 25 has a college degree, which includes all crummy state colleges (I can say that because I got a degree from one, as an "adult learner" no less). So my guess is that about 20% of the East Coast has "at least one parent" who has a professional job. In manhattan probably 50%+, in Orange County, probably 10%. Just saying

Several years ago, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, and two other researchers found that top colleges gave no admissions advantage to low-income students, despite claims to the contrary.
[...]

The result of these changes is that Amherst has a much higher share of low-income students than almost any other elite college

I strongly suspect that Amherst's poor people recruiting is race blind. That's the only way they could find enough students in the US who are up to their academic standards. It's almost certainly an excellent long-term strategy too; the relatively poor will likely be fairly fervent in their support for the alma mater.

In itself, this doesn't really matter, a college that takes in less than 2k students a year won't change anything unless the model brings in money. But it should. Taking smart people and giving them that hireable by Goldman or McKinsey stamp, that should lead to donations.

Can someone please tell me how Ga Tech made the list (not trying to hate, I'm from GA and my dad is a yellow jacket)?

Top 5 Engineering school. Surprised you even asked. Yes, I did go to GT.

Edit: GT as I remember had a large minority student body. I believe that we graduate more african american engineers than any other school in the country. We are also a less expensive public school.

They're using a very, very broad definition of elite, as in there are 193 colleges in the "elite". It would be kind of unusual if a university that's comparable with MIT didn't reach that level.

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