Yes! Finally the admissions committee can admit exactly who it wants, without any pesky objective criteria to hamper their social justice ideals!
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note these ones—you broke all of them here:
"Don't be snarky."
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The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/caltech-college-admissions-...
It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.
If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society. That might mean some high achievers losing out on their first choice college, it might mean affirmative action, etc.
Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
Given what you're replying to, it sounds like you're suggesting that Asian Americans dominate power in this country, which I must be misinterpreting because that's ridiculous. I do agree with the general sentiment that what high achievers deserve is not necessarily what's good for society, but I'd say we should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
(1) each job being filled by the person who's better suited for it than any other person
*versus*
(2) each job being filled by a person who's better suited for it than for any other job
You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict. And it's hard to be honest from the point of view of hiring people, that (1) is basically not a realistic option. Everybody says their goal is to hire the best person for a job without acknowledging that the best person is not, and should not, be available.
Is (2) optimal for society? I'm not sure, but I think society is closer to that than (1). But "meritocracy" sounds more like (1) to me.
They are not in conflict at all, this is what the basic welfare theorems of economics say.
It's just that #2 and #1 are impossible to achieve because it requires perfect information about each person and each job, and a unified labor market, which just isn't realistic, as information has a cost and labor markets are fragmented.
In the real world, we are lucky to get some aspects of both #1 and #2, in the sense that people do search for jobs best suited for them, but imperfectly, and employers do search for workers best suited for each job, but imperfectly, and you kinda meet in the middle. If you want, you can call "meritocracy" the freedom of the employer to hire the best worker available, but I'm not sure of a snappy phrase to describe the freedom of the worker to search for the best job available. Maybe someone came up with a label for that. But really they are flipsides of a process that leads to an optimum, they are not two opposing forces where one makes the other impossible. It is like buying and selling, the supply curve does not make the demand curve impossible; both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet. If you mess with either the demand curve or the supply curve, you do not end up at the optimum price, you end up losing welfare somehow.
Obviously anything that can reduce frictions helps you get closer to the meeting of 1 and 2. For example, greater availability of job boards and pay transparency, working condition transparency to get information about available jobs to workers, or things like more accurate information about worker skills and talents to employers (e.g. meaningfulness of degrees play a role here as do rigorous interviews). Really both worker and employer are facing a murky question trying to figure out "how good is the other side here?". Both need as much information as possible.
It is the costliness of information that keeps us away from 1 and 2 simultaneously.
Yes they are. Imagine World War II. The best person to dig a particular ditch might be Alan Turing. But that's completely different from the best job for Alan Turing being digging that ditch.
>both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet
I think that optimum and equilibrium are different things and a single price cannot be optimum even if it is the equilibrium.
Is this stuff at all familiar?
No, Alan Turing would be pretty bad at digging ditches, and there would be many people who could do the job just as well or not better than he.
So in that environment, the code breaker team needs someone, and the ditch digging team needs someone, and if it turns out that Alan is in the ditch and Joe doing an awful job breaking codes, then the code breaking team will try to fire Joe and hire Alan, and the ditch digging team wont mind switching Joe for Alan. Thus this swap is a pareto improving trade, and there are no pareto improving trades in equilibrium, therefore no equilibrium process would settle on Alan in the ditch and Joe breaking codes.
So look, this is an actual body of science and math that you can't just dismiss without understanding and thinking about. There are legitimate criticisms of welfare theorems -- the ones I outlined, namely around lack of perfect information -- does the code breaking team know how good Alan is at breaking codes? Does Alan know there is a job opening other than ditch digging? Etc. It is all about information, but to just pretend that the welfare theorems don't exist because you haven't thought of them or they don't seem intuitively "true" to you is neither a good avenue of exploration nor of debate. These are, after all, theorems. You attack theorems by attacking their hypotheses, not by "disagreeing" with them or just asserting that they are false.
> I think that optimum and equilibrium are different things and a single price cannot be optimum even if it is the equilibrium.
This is, mathematically, false. But it's also irrelevant because there is not one price, there is a single price vector. Alan and Joe don't earn the same wage. The budget of the ditch project and code breaking project are also not the same.
It's a contrived example that illustrates something general. It could still be true - maybe Turing would have some insight that let him do half as much labor. But whether it's actually true for him is irrelevant.
Let's say the manager of a McDonald's started out making hamburgers and does it better than any of the other employees, but doesn't normally do it any more, unless there's a crisis and they have to fill in when nobody else is available. Or some software engineer at Google would be better at processing data for litigation purposes than anyone in that industry, yet they outsource the work.
"greater equality" is tautological when you have instituted equality of outcome, but does it produce greater happiness? I don't believe it to do so. It reduced overall outcome - as those who are forced down will not produce as much as they could've.
"Equality of outcome" == "greater equality"... Well yea, assuming outcome is definable and changing those outcomes to be "equal" is possible, by definition, things would be more "equitable" by that same definition.
"Greater happiness" - I assume you mean greater overall societal happiness. That's quite a subjective claim. I'm not sure that's even a measurable thing, but do you have any evidence of this?
Sure, go ahead and see what happens when you disconnect negative behavior from negative outcomes. I'm sure that has no long-term consequences for your civilization.
Getting back to Harvard, everyone who goes there will be extremely competent. You seem to be suggesting that they'll be accepting slackers and truants.
Now. Once they start admitting students absent an IQ test, don't be surprised when it's prestige and the assumed quality of it's graduates is diminished.
It is purely happenstance that these institutions have even had to consider caring about how they gatekeep genpop’s upwards mobility for the last half a century.
They literally have no reason to care. They believe attendees want higher education for the pursuit of academic knowledge and are so disconnected from the desperate reality. And they’re right, they can weather this fad.
The ombudsman closes the thick book in the monestary, blows dust off the back, walks outside and says “there are third generation people with Asian heritage in this country? huh, how about that.” Goes back into their monk quarters after replacing the wax, lights another candle and goes back into the books. This is how these institutions function. They don’t know anything about how passionate, desperate or how much energy has been put into simply getting in, they don’t know why its important to people except for them loving the attention and pride and money.
The ideology of Equality of Outcome has literally lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people worldwide(Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot).
That's fine, but the question is, who gets to decide? Individuals.
> Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
Receiving unearned money doesn't lead to happiness due to lack of fulfillment. Having earned money taken away doesn't lead to happiness due to a lack of reward. Equality of outcome always ends up killing the initiative and freedoms needed for prosperity to support such a society to begin with.
>It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.
By that logic, the alternative is you get more people in government, commerce etc. who are significantly less conscientious and dutiful? That doesn't exactly sound like a great thing for society.
Not significantly so, no. These are still cream of the crop within their group.
> That doesn't exactly sound like a great thing for society.
It's not ideal, but far better than the alternative.
That's what votes are for on this site.
That’s why they have things like essays and consider extracurricular activities. Most of the selective Universities specifically exclude people with high grades and very little else that they were involved in.
Moreover, I recall reading at some point that at least some of the Ivy’s, during at least the first half of the 20th century, specifically avoided students with the highest grades in favor of those who were more like a B+ average and were more social, which they determined through the very subjective means of interviewing students on campus. (I’m old enough that I recall some of my friends visiting Universities for such meetings, but I have no idea if they still meet prospective students like this).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/14...
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
I believe the specific things I am talking about were discussed in relation to introversion and The Ivy’s specifically wanting to lean toward extroverts who were well-rounded and had good social skills.
She had a sterling high school record, but they wrote a rejection letter explaining that they already had a woman attending the institution.
The punch line, as it were, as I recall it, was that "a woman" did not mean one undergraduate woman, but just one, period.
So, she went to a much less prestigious and well-known school, majored in math, and ended up being a programmer instead of an engineer.
I am not sure if she was bitter about it.
And really we do it for college too. Except it is “we already have enough comp science majors”.
Just the Ivies? UW is explicit: they want racial "equity". Meaning they won't admit more Asians, as a percentage, than the population they are picking candidates from. And they promote it as a good thing: https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/diversity-and-equity-f...
The easiest way to get into UW is to be (graduate high school) from eastern Washington, they actually have a state mandated quota for that.
People who read college applications are "guided" by Universities using a system of feedback so they can get whatever outcome they want. Read more about that here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
College admission officers don’t get access to race and such when reviewing applications. Yes, they can add points to it, but that happens after the rest of the application is reviewed, and can’t be done without explicitly saying they are doing it.
Read the NYT story I linked to, to understand how application readers are gently guided to consider race, without explicitly being told to do so.
Excerpt from the story:
"I received an e-mail from the assistant director suggesting I was not with the program: “You’ve got 15 outlier, which is quite a lot."
If some people base their opinions this way for validation: I’m a minority.
Nip it in the bud, take it to court, call it out for what it is. Race based discrimination has no place in this society, find another way, especially for any institution that takes any state or federal funding, you can totalllly curb stomp that approach.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j...
There's a reason why lawyers are the second biggest financial contributors to the Democrats among professions:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBwtxXnUUAIAm8W?format=jpg&name=...
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta...
Anti-discrimination lawyers are licking their lips at the prospect of sueing SpaceX next, this time for sexual harassment:
https://www.space.com/spacex-sexual-harassment-allegations-l...
The explanation provided by the essays is coherent and resonates with I have seen.
The Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use IQ tests to hire applicants. It is totalitarian in nature and needs to be scaled back to enable a free society where a sanctimonious elite is not using the force of the state to reshape private citizens.
Take it to federal court, then take it to federal appeals court. If the 9th circuit doesn’t match conservative land, do the same in another circuit.
You’re playing the helpless victim while having way more resources than the “protected classes” that you feel are oppressing your way of life, all because you (and the organizations that didnt appeal) are afraid of the PR. The protected classes dealt with way more than “potentially bad PR” to create this reality so just take the L and get the courts to correct it.
The wokification of US law was established by the Civil Rights Act. As far back as the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that using IQ tests to vet job applicants is a form of prohibited discrimination under the CRA.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...
It's like a human menagerie. Imagine choosing the animals for a zoo. Even if it were agreed which kind of animal was best (I like zebras), a zoo full of nothing but zebras would lose the interest and support of the public. Therefore, some "lesser" animals must be included, to provide the variety that makes it a zoo.
The "elite" college needs a curation process, and it has to be opaque, or it will be easily gamed, and the student body will turn into a freak show, spoiling its brand. There is enough demand, and little enough true variety among high school students, that a straight numerical admissions threshold will produce a class of effectively identical students.
No, the biggest issue is the size of the student bodyis kept stagnantly small to maintain exclusivity. Perhaps this made sense in an analog age but at some point in the digital world of plenty this will get/needs to be disrupted.
The game changer will be when some University figures out how to become the Apple of higher education. Previously high end phones achieved prestige by adding diamonds, gold plating, a high price tag and only a select few stores that people in the know could find (i.e. the Nokia Vertu).
Somehow Apple figured out how to maintain prestige/exclusivity while essentially servicing the entire market.
It will be a breakthrough for humanity when a University figures out how to replicate this combo of prestige and quality at scale for higher education.
You think it hasn't been tried?
First, there's a chicken-or-egg problem. By virtue of being one of the oldest universities in America, Harvard was originally an elite institution that was powered by the tuition paid for by the children of elite parents. To start a new "Harvard-but-bigger", you need to figure out where the "elite" part comes from. In the absence of a pre-existing elite alumni body, you need to enforce rigorous academic standards on your early graduating classes and let your reputation grow from there. But, you also need to deliver the rigorous academic standards at scale.
MOOCs were one attempt, but it's impossible to defend against cheating online. It's hard enough to stop cheating in real-world exam rooms, letting people go through examinations at home makes it impossible.
If you require people to show up in-person, then you reach physical limits to scale very quickly. Even if you try to combine MOOC-style lectures with building out a network of controlled examination centers in the real world, the attempts to expand American standardized testing abroad show that you begin to run into problems of corrupt test center administrators. It's like the fast food franchise model, where the restaurant corporate headquarters finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the same standards across all of their franchised locations, except that with examinations, your day-to-day users want your standards to be compromised.
The community colleges in my state are so great. They do such a huge service, and they do it economically. You can get a 4 year degree by spending 2 years at a community college and the other 2 at a state university. That's like the bargain of the century. The CoCo's keep an eye on the curriculum at the big schools, so the students are prepared, and there's no hassle with transferring credits. And their focus is on teaching.
Disclosure: One of my kids attends the big school, the other is at one of the regional schools, both are in good situations.
I think that the "elite" schools can be left to their own devices, on their own funding, and turn themselves into a freak show if they want. Public attention should turn towards supporting and developing better access to education for the rest of us, starting with the community college system.
In a few decades, I hope we will look back on privatized higher education, the way we look on privatized health care today.
* Take about 2/5 of students from the elites
* Take about 3/5 of students who are brilliant
Students of the elites look smart by association. Students who are brilliant are brought into powerful, moneyed social networks. It works well for everyone involved.
The focus on alumni donations is a little bit overblown. Harvard has way more money than it needs. What Harvard looks for is a lot richer than that. The alumni base is part of the national -- and increasingly international -- power structure. A president of some country, a high court justice, or similar sorts of power positions can be at least as important as a billionaire. Likewise, branding is important. The current push on DEI is to make sure that (1) the brand doesn't suffer (2) DEI-focused positions are filled by elite school alumni, and not focused on actual change to power structures.
(Though obviously not in this case because you correctly called it out)
Ivy League this year will have material overrepresentation of Latino and Black kids, substantial overrepresentation of Asian and Jewish kids, and up to 10% 'Children of Alumni', another overrepresentation.
Which leaves those not in those groups out in the lurch.
And one’s ability to pass the SAT proves only that one can pass the SAT. It just proves they were privileged enough to have some one teach them “the tricks and tactics to pass the test” - not understanding, not potential, and not intelligence.
In the late 1990s I practiced and bumped my score up about 100 points. Do I think it made a difference to the college I went to? Doubtful.
I think the better question is: Do the tests accurately predict if a student will do well in college? That's their point, and if schools have better ways to predict if an applicant will succeed, there's no point in using the test.
Maybe instead of lowering standards, we should push kids to practice.
The dismay here is not due to a believe that testing correctly plucks the best minuscule number of deserving applicants that get in. It’s that everything else that is used is worse.
I find it to be extremely destructive to spend all your time complaining about problems, and none finding solutions. That’s more or less what Maxism is: a long list of faults with capitalism and a half-baked untested idea of what could maybe be a solution. And we’ve seen the damage that ideology has done.
Sure, as long as they have the free time to devote to that (which they may not, if they have to work through high school). Alternatively, they can hire an (expensive) tutor, which can help.
If scores are an important factor for admission, then that selects for people who:
* are good at standardized testing
* or, have the extra time and/or money to improve their score
There are, of course, many other things at play here; but it's a start!
You can say that about GPA too.
You just stated a very objective and valuable thing: they benefit people who practice. And it turns out that the will to practice doing things you don't know how to do is the most important skill you can have in life.
BTW Canada didn't have SAT requirement for college application I think they are doing OK. They do look at GPA during high school though.
It doesn't make too much sense to over indexing on this when it is already discounted in a significant way.
"Objective" entry is never coming back to college admissions.
Broaden your definition of admissions.
Standardized test scores do very little to predict college success when controlling for other variables. And they're trivial to game.
They're a relic of back when people believed in IQ tests were useful selection criteria. Maybe there will be standardized tests in the future that are more useful, but we don't have those yet.
You make a distinction without a difference in this case, and what other variables are you controlling for? Class rank? That can't be gamed, you think? Rich people will always game the system, whatever it is. In many cases, the alternatives are AP exams, which aren't even available in all schools.
What criterion would you suggest? A lottery?
IQ tests are a very reliable proxy for academic performance potential. Is this even in dispute?
IQ tests are maybe ok at doing population-level correlations, but not at predicting the success of any given individual. Tons of things are correlated with intelligence, and IQ has the virtue that it's easy to measure. So it has uses for things like research studies.
But as an actual filter when you care about performance it's not great. Things like high school GPA are easier to measure and more predictive of college success.
needs sources, and unbiased ones.
The burden of proof lies with the person making a claim.