Think critically about college admissions
freddiedeboer.substack.com
freddiedeboer.substack.com
I find this particularly egregious because voters in both states rejected affirmative action very recently and yet the state funded administrations of these schools are going ahead with these policies.
That mindset leads to bullying police departments believing it's okay to randomly shoot people.
The whole system is designed as an indirect democracy. I elected people who hire people who work on my behalf.
/s
Another interesting development: WA rejected affirmative action once again in 2019, but recently the state passed a law requiring medical schools at state universities to set goals around increasing representation of underrepresented minorities (https://www.google.com/amp/s/mynorthwest.com/2911254/rantz-w...), which is effectively a race based cap on Asian enrollment. It seems the legislators are playing word games and trying to claim this doesn’t violate the law since it doesn’t set a “quota” but instead asks for correction of under representation.
Rosa Parks wasn't the only person asked to sit in the back of the bus.
Caltech [0] and MIT [1] are a good example (both small and extremely prestigious, catering to a mostly engineering/scientific crows and recruiting from the same pool of academics outliers both nationally and internationally)
Now, can anyone spot the difference?
[0] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/california-institute...
[1] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-instit...
Being of a certain minority group, even if I had a perfect prodigal SAT + GPA combo, I would have a 15% chance of getting in. At that point there is no point to taking the SAT, if it's all random chance. [2] Note: I definitely did not have a perfect GPA, or any SAT. Getting rid of the SAT has zero effect on whether I get in.
I still agree with him overall, but until we can get to a point where if you get good grades, you get a spot at a proportionally good university, worrying about the SAT will not matter.
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> The only reason to tweet a graph or chart at someone rather than to report a coefficient of determination is to obfuscate.
That isn't true. They use graphs and charts because most people don't understand what a coefficient of determination is. If you tweeted out that number, your tweet would not convince anyone because they wouldn't know what it means.
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Oh good, so merit is out the window. So what was the net good of shipping me 3 hours by bus roundtrip per day to a crappier school across town? (Waking-up before 5 am.) Oh that's right, because there were too many other white and/or Asian kids in the school a block from my house. I guess I just didn't have the right skin color. Leave it to 80's Californian affirmative action to "fix" schools with culture-shock, not fitting-in, racism, violence, and gang warfare. "We'll get you, whitey/Asian, by giving you our pain. That'll teach you not to be white/Asian." is the message it sends.
So this grand social experiment is so the kids who didn't earn admissions can get a degree they won't earn to get a job they won't earn so they won't know anything but entitlement because social justice through identity promotion fixes everything. That'll teach all those hard-working overachievers' parents to move to a different country like Finland, send China's sea turtles to go elsewhere, and destroy what was once America's greatest advantage.
Oh yeah and you know, the scientific method is "racist" (I, no shit, had a roommate applicant tell me this with a straight face recently). I became so flabbergasted I couldn't talk to them anymore.
This makes me sad. Instead of becoming more meritocratic and fairer, we're further entrenching racism and discrimination without calling it that. Orwellian doublespeak and doublethink. What would MLK Jr think of all this?
Let's just have no standards of excellence at all and give everyone an Ivy or Pac12 degree for participation. Double gold stars if people in any of your attribute groups ever had anything bad happen to them. First peoples? Slaves? Armenians? Jews? Italians? Irish? Spanish? Where does it stop?
At some point we just have to say "enough," or it devolves into absurdity and dishonesty when admissions are unmoored pure merit and reality.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
There's not a lot of easy solutions to undoing decades of segregation.
> didn't even bother applying to Ivys or Pac12s where "everyone else" was going because those places didn't interest me.
Based on your username and talking about the 80s I'm going to guess you were born in 1978, i.e. are roughly the same age as me. I find it interesting you talk about "Pac12" (and it's not just a typo, you do it a lot) considering that until 2011 it was the "Pac10".
For those not familiar with US college sports, the Pac10 at the time doggodaddo78 and I would have been applying to college was, in vague north-to-south order, University of Washington, Washington State University, University of Oregon, Oregon State University, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, University of Southern California, University of Arizona, and Arizona State University. The Pac12 retains those same teams, but adds University of Colorado and University of Utah.
There's definitely some world-class schools in there, but with respect to all the Cougs I've ever known, I would not put, say, Washington State among the greats.
(Disclaimer: I was accepted to two of those Pac10 schools but could not afford to go to either, so went instead to a smaller state school).
Same reason we don’t have enough engineering seats in the usa and use H1B to fill in engineering positions in Silicon Valley. Colleges have quotas, Silicon Valley doesn’t.
Schools have quotas, reality / the market doesn’t.
If you look globally, you don't even need quotas. The world is approximately 65% Asian, so is the student body at magnet high schools with merit based entrance tests. the world is approximately 5% African.
Lower tier engineering schools have room. And anyone can start a program. They're just filling seats with other things, like master's programs. But they'd rather have undergrads. And the ranking of these schools would increase as they got better students. The simple problem is not enough people want to major in engineering. The situation is the same everywhere (China/India are just bigger). But those places can't raise salaries to resolve it. US tech leaders clearly can.
The H1B helped keep this from resolving itself the normal way, i.e. where companies have to pay more to attract people to the field. I think it also relocated a big chunk of the developing world's tech growth to the US, so American executives could be the ones who benefited from it (yay for them). So it makes the domestic shortcoming worse in two ways.
Or can. A lot of schools are happy to admit almost anyone, but will have 1/3 of incoming freshmen transfer to other majors after a year.
> I think it also relocated a big chunk of the developing world's tech growth to the US, so American executives could be the ones who benefited from it (yay for them)
Employees too. It lowers the wages a little, but creates a much bigger market where software for the world is built in America. So there's more competitors. It's not uncommon for American companies to have half of their revenues in international markets but way less than 50% foreign employees.
> Or can. A lot of schools are happy to admit almost anyone, but will have 1/3 of incoming freshmen transfer to other majors after a year.
Definitely agree about this part though. A big reason some countries can achieve higher number of grads or better ratios of one kind or another, is with a dumbed-down program that requires mostly memorization and teaches nothing in depth.
That only works out about right if you're still on the 3/5ths compromise, but accidentally apply it twice.
Probably better to just think of every one as individuals.
Global wealth Numbers are interesting though, https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...
Also see this past discussion on Harvard dropping test scores: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535528
The expected impact of these changes in testing is that admissions will be less about merit, and effectively punish Asian students who are on average more meritorious and therefore earn more college seats than you would expect based on their population numbers. Therefore these other discussions about “holistic” admissions processes are also worth visiting:
Harvard rating Asian students lower on personality traits as part of their “holistic” admissions process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320360
More on quirks of Harvard’s admissions, like their “z-list”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17641360
Yale’s discrimination against Asians: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352
Forcing people to take a "general intelligence" exam when college is about specializing in a particular major isn't a good metric in my opinion. Students could devote that time to other things: studying particular subjects that are relevant to what they may want to study.
I also find the tone of the article obnoxious. The author basically says that people who disagree with him aren't thinking critically. Sure, some of them. But there are plenty of people who have thought critically about this and disagree with the author. Also all the zingers about "liberals" are idiotic. Not everyone who disagrees with him is a liberal. It's unnecessarily divisive, and frankly makes it seem like the author is lazily throwing everyone into 2 buckets: conservative or liberal rather than thinking critically. Ironic.
Passing 1 or 2 subject tests just shows that a student can: pick a subject, study it, and pass an exam on it. Which is what almost every class in college is like. There is no "general intelligence" class in college, or high school. Studying for a general intelligence test is not what college, high school, or any job is actually like. Studying for a test in a particular subject is useful for high school, college, and a requirement for some jobs (i.e. law, medicine, etc.)
You're right that some classes are just participation/presentation. But I still think subject tests are a lot closer to "real" high school/college/job than a general intelligence test.
I'm a member of a number of alumni groups of academic institutions and have seen Facebook discussions devolve quite like the author describes. Presenting actual data refuting emotionally held positions gets you labeled and libeled.
Edited- fixed stuff, finished my thought
“ I’m supposed to understand that a first generation kid whose parents started their flight from Laos on a raft made from tires are the beneficiaries of the cultural biases of a bunch of ETS employees?”
Which he doesn’t cite statistics showing these folks are the ones disadvantaged by the policy (though I agree lumping all Asians together doesn’t make sense).
Yes, exactly. His ultimate point in this article, if I understood that right (i.e., affirmative action can be helpful, but it is the beginning, not the end of the support for those people it helps) I find quite reasonable. Everything leading up to that point seemed to be saying "the system is doing exactly what it was intended to, the people who think this is fixable are fools, we should just leave it alone." I think a lot of people who might otherwise agree with his point would get lost in the liberal-bashing.
So I wonder what he means by calling himself a Marxist. Clearly he’s diverging from the party lines.