Comment by TheCowboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheCowboy | Hacker News Reader

I think race acts as more of a red herring when it comes to this matter. This entire thread just sounds like privileged or talented people(nothing wrong with being either) fighting over admittance to elite universities. After all, people qualified to get into Yale, and this is a large number of applicants, will still get into a very good university.

Maybe the problem is that going to an elite school matters too much for arbitrary social reasons. We've all heard and read about how hiring at places, such as elite financial institutions, will simply discard any application from a person who didn't go to an elite university. No one wants to lose out on opportunity.

Why can't elite universities increase enrollment to increase the number of opportunities? They have the endowments for it. I'm not aware of any Ivy struggling to pay its bills.

If society thinks that people who attend these schools are a better value, then wouldn't it be of benefit to try to expand capacity?

It seems like an artificially created scarcity. Do top schools feel their brand is diminished if they start accepting 2k students vs 1.5k?

Because their brand CAN be diminished if they start accepting more students. More students need more professors, and it might be hard fighting over who gets to hire the best professors. It might also change the student community. I go to a university that is considered prestigious in my country, and what I like the most about it is how it's so easy to find incredibly smart people on the campus, with which you can have great intellectual discussions. If there were more people, it could be harder to find who these great people are. It's a Brazilian public university, which means it's free, and while recently it was created a quota for black and public school students, the majority of students is accepted in a completely color, name, cultural blind manner.

The university system has created a surplus of people with phds who are qualified and intellectually capable of being university professors. There are a lot of good articles about how the job market for those wanting to become professors is terrible.

I think race acts as more of a red herring when it comes to this matter.

Agreed. Allowing elite universities to continue to serve up this shadow-play of a sorting function has led to a perverse credentialism that often fails to reflect the actual performance or qualifications of elite graduates.

And even if I were to concede that admissions to elite schools should matter, this thread's focus on URMs reminds me of the joke that was circulating earlier this fall, punchline: 'Watch out for that URM guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.’

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/golden1.htm

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