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jlos

One of the best ideas I've heard for college admissions is the following:

- Small percentage (10-20%) based purely on performance (either academic or athletic)

- All other admitted applications drawn randomly from a pool who achieve a base score on SAT's.

With the following benefits:

- Student population reflective of national demographics due to random sampling.

- Elimination of bias and discrimination endemic to these institutions history

- Could even mark our 5% for "legacy" status students to keep the elite donors happy.

- Motivation for students: anyone who can achieve a baseline has a real chance of attending an elite university

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Have you seen the SAT score vs. race charts? This would just make Harvard 50+% Asian (like Caltech), when they make up 7% of the US.

Wow, I looked up the data to refute this, but it was worse than I presumed:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...

My initial thought was we could just have a floor. We don't need to ensure a perfect score amongst the pool that gets randomly selected, so if there there is minimum that is still "high," and that isn't biased toward outliers from any race, then it would work.

But it looks like the floor we'd need to have a reasonable representation would be something like a 500/800 math score. That is much too low, at least for elite schools. Choosing something like a 700 cut-off ends up being very racially selective.

Math is much more disparate than Verbal (ERW). You can see the data at https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/2020-total-group-sat-su...

Maybe that's what it should be, then? I wouldn't expect to get in, displacing a student with a higher score, just because I'm white.

Maybe it is. This is a philosophical discussion that adcoms have been struggling with for 40 years.

Making more universities like Caltech sounds wonderful to me.

I think you misunderstood. A Random acceptance above an achievable standard (e.g average marks of 80%) would reduce racial disparities. It doesn't matter what races are the top performers, it just matters how many people can achieve the base standard.

The entire basis of elite status comes from the notion that not just anyone can attend.

Your proposal effectively removes college as a signal of elite status, and thus people will organically invent new symbols that most will lack and we will be back to where we started very quickly.

Good. We will always have elite status symbols. They don't have to take 4 years of your life like college.

well it can just be decided by your birth instead then?

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