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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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"?

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