Comment by v_london | Hacker News Reader

Comment by v_london | Hacker News Reader

Holding university entrance exams earlier seems like a recipe for disaster that would hurt disadvantaged students the most. This may be just my experience, but the older you get, the more time you get to catch up with students from better families. Coming from a working class background, I only started to study actively in high school (the culture I grew up in discouraged and actively mocked boys who read books or liked maths) which means that had the entrance exam be held at the beginning of high school, I would not have done as well as I did at the ned of high school.

The problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society to their expected rank. One of the jobs of the elite schools is to prop us these average kids and to make them seem smart to outsiders: anyone who has studied in an "elite" university has a story about the rich kids who spend their days partying, intending to only pass the easiest classes in the school because that's all they need - their parents have already arranged an entry-level job for them.

>The problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society to their expected rank.

I disagree with the second half of this. I think it simply creates an arm race that the wealthy win. A rich family looks at what it takes to get their kid into Harvard and they do what they can, no matter the cost. A poor family simply can't compete on an otherwise equal footing. Even if we socialize all the advantages that the rich currently have, they simply do even more in response.

The real problem with a meritocratic system is that rich people from good schools with private tutors actually get a better education, that's what all the hubub is about. Poverty leads to worse education and worse educated people are less prepared for the more difficult course load of college. Through no fault of their own, they are less ideal candidates. That's the injustice.

It's cognitive dissonance to simultaneously recognize that injustice but not recognize that poor students are actually substantially less prepared for college at 18.

This just doesn't fit the evidence. I've wanted Freakonomics or similar to cover this for a decade but haven't really seen/heard seen anything...

If getting into top (TOP!) universities correlated with education/aptitude alone, the wealthy would pay more to get thier kids educated but the best teachers. But they don't do this, they pay to dollar for their children to get educated by the "best" schools. But what makes them the best schools is their ability to get more kids into better universities. If education were the critical component of these schools, they'd pay premium rates for the best teachers, but often the teacher salaries at these private schools are lower than those at the public schools they compete with in the area. That suggests that it isn't the education provided by the teachers that's the most important component of these schools. There's a whole stew of other factors that these schools rely on to get kids into top placements that had nothing to do with actual education.

> If getting into top (TOP!) universities correlated with education/aptitude alone, the wealthy would pay more to get thier kids educated but the best teachers. But they don't do this, they pay to dollar for their children to get educated by the "best" schools.

Simple! People receive a benefit from peer group connections (status) and quality-based assessments (in economic terms, reputation). If you are well educated and intelligent, on average, you will have access to more resources if you are also associated with high-status institutions, such as prestigious schools and high ranked universities.

The good news is that, under competitive conditions and provided that everything else is equal, being "good at something" (reputation) eventually leads to high-status attainment. So, if you happen to receive a good education but graduate from a less prestigious university, you have an opportunity to eventually recoup the difference in resource availability (on average & assuming that your production translates to the market).

Likewise, if you're a less prestigious institution, providing a superior education and employing people who do "good research" will eventually increase your prestige.

It can be difficult to overcome initial conditions and shine if you are locked out of the best opportunities. The bimodal outcomes for law school graduates are a good example. That’s not how the whole economy works, but it is a potential failure mode.

https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c...

> That’s not how the whole economy works, but it is a potential failure mode

There are others. E.g., if you're line of work doesn't allow for high-status recognition (e.g., a blue collar job), being good at what you do will likely not allow you to benefit from reputation -> status transfer.

Friends of mine work at these private schools for lower salaries than public schools. The reality is the job sucks a lot less. You get ~100% engaged students, supportive parents, and a school administration with minimal perverse incentives. Struggling students and discipline problems get filtered out and sent somewhere else. There a loads of qualified teachers, and really plenty of very capable teachers. There is no need for the schools to pay a premium to get the best teachers.

Imagine if 99% of programming jobs were on Win32 native apps using tools from 1998, and 1% of them were using modern tools on a modern Unix-derived stack? Would the 1% really have to pay a premium to get top 10% developers?

I was about to compose this exact comment… thanks for saving me the trouble. In K-12 education, and especially elementary level, the job is at least as much about daycare as it is education. And well-socialized children makes the daycare part of the job a lot easier, so less stress = less demand for financial inducements (compensation).

Best answer and a good metaphor. Paying more only goes so far in attracting talent. You need the job to be manageable, the environment needs to be at the least not actively hostile, and the system the job exists within to not be completely broken.

Incentive alignment would help too. If only there was a socially and legally tractable way to pay teachers like sales reps…

You are only considering salary and not overall quality of life. As one of my teachers at private school said, "you get paid a little less, but you don't have to worry about being robbed by your students in the parking lot."

Innate intelligence is a huge factor in education. Rich parents can prepare their children very well, but it’s only changing the minimums. This is why elite schools always have an easy track to graduate they don’t want to dispel the illusion that their actually elite schools, but they also don’t want to turn away the children of billionaires etc.

> Rich parents can prepare their children very well, but it’s only changing the minimums.

If you need an example of this, take a look at the admissions scandal with Lori Laughlin, et al. No denying they were rich, but despite how rich they were, they could not tutor their kids way to a good SAT score and had to resort to outright cheating that was so blatant that they had to go to prison.

Might be good for society as a whole if the elite has at least to study hard. (not in terms of equality, but outcome compared internationally). A failed state is where the kids of rich ppl flunk school and still become leaders.

Poverty leads to fewer social connections and that follows the rest of the outcome.

People in a cohort fall into a bell curve. “Social lubricant” is why the dumb or less capable kid in a rich suburb ends up being some sort of professional in a nebulous job where the smart kid from a poor neighborhood feels like Starbucks or an LPN is a life changing job.

There isn't much meritocracy in the system, at least as far as I can see. In Czech we have a saying "the wolf has eaten, but the goat remained whole" for situations like that.

The American elite wants to be seen as anti-racist, which means elevating at least some kids from the ghettos to the Ivy Leagues etc. At the same time, the American elite is still mostly white and does not want to jeopardize future of their own offspring, and many of those offspring are indeed average.

It seems to me that the current way to square those two interests is to raise tuition really high, combine it with legacy admissions (even an average kid of rich parents will be able to thread the needle there) and raise higher admission obstacles for Asians who would otherwise qualify in high numbers on knowledge alone.

The from ghetto don't go to Ivy League. These are middle and upper class blacks studying there.

Like really, not every educated black rose from ghetto.

Yes exactly. And also dumb down public schools by not teaching advanced classes and getting rid of magnet schools like the Democrats are doing in multiple states. While of course still teaching those classes at the private schools that upper middle class and above can afford. Gotta keep those smart poor people in their place.

This is fairly new. Magnet schools and accelerated classes for smart poor people used to be something that we considered good, because we want at least a few smart people getting educated. Now that "smart poor people" generally means "people of asian descent," we're changing course and getting rid of all of those programs.

Do you have a ref for any state that is eliminating magnets? I hadn't heard ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/nyregion/nyc-schools-admi...

A disproportionate percentage of the US elite is also Jewish. Yet they, as a society, seem to have mostly overcome the tensions that have plagued Jews and white non-Jews in Europe for a very long time. What makes you think that the US "melting pot" culture cannot overcome other obstacles (currently IMO mostly exemplified with the rising Asian "elite")

Well, I think it definitely can and probably will; for example, given how hard the Asian children tend to be driven by their parents, I expect them to occupy a significant part of the elite in 2050, bringing with them very different perspectives, too.

(The same process, albeit on a much smaller scale, is taking place in the Czech Republic. We have a Vietnamese minority that began as convenience store owners, but their children are rising fast into the educated elite of the country.)

But that process will be fraught with a lot of conflict and will likely require abandonment of any efforts to pre-balance student bodies by ethnicity.

The elephant in the room is culture, of course. The relative freedom of the American economic system ensures that any group with strong “meritocratic” cultural values will eventually come to occupy a disproportionate share of the economic elite.

The obvious advantage of Jewish culture is (in part) its ancient tradition of demanding literacy from everyone. East Asian cultures also place a high value on literacy, and the Confucian emphasis on social harmony tends to promote an ideal of “self-cultivation”.

I think the real challenge here is that within the American “melting pot,” one particular group has a tragic history of cultural devastation, and no amount of money or assistance from outsiders can rebuild a strong culture—it can only come from within. In fact, outside interference is likely to obstruct this process.

"Fresh" African immigrants are quite successful and I believe that Nigerian Americans have the highest share of PhDs of all groups. Selective immigration will do that.

But the fact that they share the same skin color with African-Americans is unlikely to help the latter. Common color does not mean common culture (as any white American traveling around Ukraine or Caucasus Mountains can find out quite easily) and rich and educated Nigerian-Americans live in a different world than descendants of slaves.

Paradoxically, a color-based affirmative action may help the already advantaged fresh immigrants at the cost of reducing the chances of one group it was supposed to help.

Yes the American elite is mostly white. Do you expect that to change over night when they have had the majority of the wealth since the dawn of the nation? White people still are make up ,I believe, ~60% of the population so even if far more minorities become successful for a very long time they will still be the majority.

These things take time to change and real progress didn't really get going until the 90's. Everyone wants instant change NOW but fails to realize things do take time.

That culture is everywhere in schools, not limited to poor people, also in middle class. These kids are suffering, and thus culture needs to be fought. Instead teachers and society are lazy and say "lol whatever boys will be boys, let's just let this kids suffer and waste more time until they are grown ups and then maybe the bullies catch up academically" Is that what you are proposing?

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