There is some truth to the heuristic that "if you got into Harvard" you have to be pretty good.
Because Harvard is really good at finding the "Harvard quality" people among applicants.
Because Harvard is really good at finding the "Harvard quality" people among applicants.
In turn, no one would ever give Jared Kusher a professorship unless he bought it.
Many universities are now signatories of the SF Declaration, where they promise to value research based on ideas, not on prestige of journals: https://sfdora.org
I have noted e.g. UMass goes one step further and asks tenure-track applicants to remove affiliation and journal names on their CVs to avoid bias. So that someone who comes from e.g. Oxford and has published in Nature is not judged to be better a priori than someone who comes from Exeter and has published in JCI.
I think this is a great initiative.
Am I being naive with the question? Is reading the publications unusual?
Then, an external committee theoretically does look only at that, and preselects candidates.
At that stage, they tell applicants and their internal committee begins looking at all non-anonymized materials.
- Very smart
- Connections to wealth and power
A bit over 2/5s of the white undergrads are admitted for the later. That came up in the Asian law suit. Similar mechanisms apply elsewhere, but we haven't had legal discovery (note: not speculation; insider knowledge).
I was following the article until I ran into xenophobia:
"The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites."
Chua is an immigrant academic who has devoted much of her life to the study of cultural dynamics in the US. She published an honest account of her life parenting in the US, coming from a different cultural background, as a means of helping people understand the immigrant experience with America trying to Americanize them.
Instead, what she did got cast through an American cultural lens, anecdotes got distorted by the media, and she got beat up over a very personal, very honest, very well-crafted account.
I am an immigrant, and her book resonated 100% with me. Things I do with my kid seem absurd from an American cultural perspective. It's not the same set of things as Amy did, at all, but that's true of most immigrant families from different cultures, be that Middle Eastern countries, Africa, or many other places.
An author of this article either doesn't know what they're writing about (they're citing a book they haven't read), or they're lying.
I've often in turn seen how those backgrounds can become safety nets, not equally distributed. The benefit of the doubt is extended very far, and when you have knowledge on the other side of the curtain it starts to look self-fulfilling sometimes.
It's hard not to look at scatterplots of things like SATs, GREs, and GPAs, and see a lot of randomness. Not pure randomness but it starts to be hard to justify to yourself when correlations of .1-.3 begin to be interpreted in the general public as if they were .9.
Do you have a link? Be keen to read about this.
How hard is that sifting process? How good is Harvard at doing that? How was it tested?
I certainly think Harvard could have made an incoming class out of rejected students and they would all be the same caliber.
I'm aware of the imperfections and biases. But I also think there is a baby in that bathwater.