Who could have seen that coming? The whole point of ditching quantitative tests is to empower the bureaucrats who want to make qualitative judgements based on their personal whims and biases. "Holistic" my ass.
I suspect nearly all people would fail this test, execpt those who've been on both sides (at least in small ways) enough times.
It is also a weird kind of neo-feudalism, excluding outsiders that cannot or won't fit the expected mold. In the court of Versailles, you had to behave according to a certain stiff etiquette. If the same is required in institutions of higher learning, how many really creative people will be willing to put up with it?
Can you give an example? At my colleges there were no rules about "stiff etiquette"
Artistic creativity brews strongest when there's an omnipresent dogma to reject, and the current pastiche of thoughtlessly-implemented progressivism is fertile ground.
It's been bubbling up in standup comedy for a while, but that tends to be the quickest turnaround on cultural commentary.
No nuanced good idea ever survives contact with a brainless bureaucracy.
Actual liberals need to field a bit of a defense against this encroachment, and in language the public can understand. "No, XYZ is not [a liberal action] because ..."
I fear this more than a backlash because it speaks in our name. Our usual political opponents reacting to us at least openly enact their own policies and messages and leave our voices and our message unmolested.
But if so, it's curious that the vocal left had shifted their attention from the disparity between people living in huts and palaces, to making sure that the people living in palaces are appropriately representative. That's a surprisingly conservative project (for better or worse).
Sounds like a perfect environment for a generation of conservatives to get elected. Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.
Think about how far we have swung in one direction. Its going the same distance in the other. May god help us.
I feel like the "the left" is undergoing a purity spiral whereas other parties are scooping up everyone pushed out.
The conservative groundswell is because generations of conservatives have already been getting elected, especially in less flashy positions that wield influence. Conservatives have really played the long game, at least since the New Deal.
It's also resulted in an effect I've noticed in most debates now where people just shout the advantages of their position and the disadvantages of their opponents position at each other without any attempt at addressing what their opponent is counter-arguing, if that makes sense.
When someone points out something Democrats did and they say "that's why I'm conservative" then when you point out something Republicans did they say "We need more than two parties"
For instance, ruling against Roe v. Wade. Regardless of what you think of that, it, such a ruling was a deviation from the status quo. It was "changing things" as surely as the original ruling changed things.
Nobody can roll back the clock. What conservatives actually do in fact is propose ways to change things going into the future.
We do have pretty good records to help us sort it out, especially for recent history.
> the circumstances of the present are different than the circumstances of the past
Surely some circumstances, such as human nature and social biology, have not changed. I'm not sure that "the state of society" is the primary differentiating factor in the effectiveness of laws, particularly laws relating to fundamental human behaviours like violence or reproduction.
I think it is, since there is great cultural variation in the ways humans think about violence and sex. Monogamy or harems; human sacrifice or the abolition of the death penalty. Any combination of these can be "normal" to people raised in that context, there is little which is fundamental about the way human societies are structured with respect to these subjects.
You're right in that there is some variation, but there do actually seem to be some choices in this regard that are more conducive to a stable, prosperous, society. Just like there are many ways to run a company, but only some of them lead to success. Point being that if you live in such a society, "changing things" may lead you off the golden path that brought you where you are. It's true that some change is inevitable, but any operator of any system that prioritizes stability above all is always wary of any unnecessary change.
Certainly not. Imprisonment for violent crimes is far from being a universal constant of human culture. There have been and are cultures in which violent criminals are only detained so they can be executed. Or beaten and then released. Or simply fined. Or not charged at all. What even counts as violent crime varies considerably even in developed countries today. Legal self-defense in one country may be murder in another.
Similarly, marriage is only culturally universal in a very abstract sense. Who are you allowed to marry? How many consecutive marriages are you allowed to have? Under what conditions can a marriage be broken? Can you be sold for marriage against your will?
> You're right in that there is some variation, but there do actually seem to be some choices in this regard that are more conducive to a stable, prosperous, society. Just like there are many ways to run a company, but only some of them lead to success. Point being that if you live in such a society, "changing things" may lead you off the golden path that brought you where you are. It's true that some change is inevitable, but any operator of any system that prioritizes stability above all is always wary of any unnecessary change.
I agree. My point is that liberals, progressives, conservatives.. pretty much everybody except the most apathetic, seek to make a change to society to turn society in a direction they think will be for the better. Each have different value systems and experiences, and accordingly have different opinions about what's wrong in society and what would constitute society being better. Conservatives frame themselves as apart from this by saying they don't want change, but "not change" is itself a change they want to impose on society to bring society back into line with their values.
But why does it even matter, other than setting things up as “us” vs. “them”?
I don't know if that was addressed to me for speaking of conservative political movements or to the conservatives, but it is not a label that I pin on an unwilling recipient; I am referring to a self-described conservative movement.
The problem is that conservatives (at least in the US, though this is happening in Europe too) have been swinging even farther to the right than most liberals have been swinging left.
I think we're in for some bad times if the leftists don't stop stepping all over their own feet, causing a backlash (that we're already seeing to some degree) that puts the autocrats in power irrevocably.
What is this center you think we are going back to because all I see are far right politicans and the end of American democracy
Granting all the problems you've cited, things have still been much worse in the past than they are today. Maybe not in the recent past, the 90s and 00s look quite rosy today in some (not all) respects, but think a bit further back. America has gone through civil war, anti-communist witch trials, frequent politically motivated bombings and assassinations, etc. Throughout all of that, people have remained hopeful that things could get better.
The greatest threat facing America today is demoralization. The belief that demise is inevitable and cannot be prevented could do America more permanent harm than anything else.
Trump is constantly saying America is a failed state. A democracy fails because people don't believe it works. All of this is republican
I'm not saying I like the American right with their religion and their fixation on abortion (I do agree with them on some other things). I'm saying maybe there's a growing trend to the right, globally, and if there is, I hope it stops in the center and stays there for a long time, because I am a centrist.
If you were to suggest that your average Republican US citizen is more centrist than your average Democrat US citizen, I would probably agree. But when it comes to the politicians and the people running the parties, I think the GOP is much farther right than the Democrats are far left.
Evangelicals are key backers of the republican party.
These "Christian nationalists" are not a majority in any shape or form, but the GOP as a party bends over backwards for them.
https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-univer...
Here's an npr article showing that the effects in nyc were overstated
https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-poli...
Can you name any policies or bills that Republicans have to make this happen? Can you prove that social norms have an effect on crime or homelessness? Are you claiming gay people are more likely to be criminals because they don't?
Homeless: "Research shows that, compared to homeless families, homeless single adults have higher rates of serious mental illness, addiction disorders, and other severe health problems." How would social norms fix that? If an adult has a mental illness and can't afford care are you willing to have universal health care? You don't think if they had family that could take them in and they were willing they would do that?
https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-ho...
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Here's some GOP news about social norms
1.https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/29/cawthorn-orgies-fre... 00021548
2.https://people.com/politics/madison-cawthorn-wife-cristina-d...
3.https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/09/29/marj...
4.https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/jd-vance-violent-mar...
"GOP SENATE CANDIDATE J.D. VANCE: IF PEOPLE LOVE THEIR KIDS, THEY’LL STAY IN VIOLENT MARRIAGES"
5.https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/23/matt-gaetz-sex-trafficking-p...
and you damn well I know go on
What does this actually mean in practice? This vague comment could mean anything from running for office, passing no laws and shouting "Hey don't get divorced" to passing laws making it illegal for anybody to get divorced.
"Supporting social norms that dissuade destructive behavior"
Nobody is for "destructive behavior". What is "destructive behavior" and what changes does this vague comment mean in practice? It could mean anything from passing no laws and shouting "don't do drugs" to dissuading homeliness by throwing all homeless people in jail.
That's not actionable. What does that even mean? What law or laws would you want proposed and passed that would accomplish that? Are there any political candidates that have a list of these laws, justifications -- with hard data -- why these sorts of laws will fix the stated problems, and a plan to get them put into place?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment but in the US, these issues are the result of conservative politics.
You’ll find a lot of “lock em up and throw away the key! … But not my son. Or my daughter. Or my nephew and his children and my former coworker. Or my pastor’s children. But everyone else, yeah”
The difference between approaches isn't "lock them up / don't" or "my kids / their kids". It's not a left/right or conservative/liberal divide, it's on another axis - more about the philosophical difference of personal vs group responsibility and meaning vs nihilism.
We need to look at the path these front running cities are taking, and where everyone else will be dragged, to see the difference. The same cities which refuse to lock up a violent junkie will lock up a parent who complains too loudly to the school board. It's not that they aren't authoritarian, often more than conservatives. It's that they don't feel there's any degradation of the individual which is ultimately wrong. Like, an individual can "choose" to be a street whore and die painfully from heroin. That's valid. This is how all junkies eventually live and die, and without a strong moral consensus that this is all bad - for the junkie and society and that we must stop it, you can't make progress on the base issues.
Vancouver will leave a junkie in their own vomit, to continue hitting the drugs that almost killed them, because "nobody should be committed against their will" but it will fine or confine an otherwise fit college student who drinks in public, or who commits any of the other offenses the junkie is committing (littering, starting fires on the sidewalk, having a violent dog, openly carrying a weapon, and so forth). The junkie has somehow "chosen" his or her role and now it's a beautiful thing, like a butterfly, that should be left to unfold, unmolested, in the parks.
Portugal, often held out as a utopia for drug users, has a "not even once in public" policy where they will jail you and assign you to a multi-year rehab program. They know nobody wants to die in their own vomit, in the street.
We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress. Once we all look at things that way we can see that our policies won't actually be too different, or rather, it doesn't matter if they are and we can work in a spirit of cooperation from different angles rather than fighting about the issue itself.
Ultimately, Portugal is a more liberal society (for drug users) than Vancouver.
Fentanyl is cut with other drugs and there's no fentanyl distribution that I can see. Care to provide a source? The drug is extremely potent to be consumed alone.
----------------------------------------
Here's a DEA warning about mass overdose events from Fentanyl "Fentanyl-related mass-overdose events, characterized as three or more overdoses occurring close in time and at the same location, have happened in at least seven American cities in recent months, resulting in 58 overdoses and 29 deaths. Cities impacted include Wilton Manors, Florida; Austin, Texas; Cortez, Colorado; Commerce City, Colorado; Omaha, Nebraska; St. Louis, Missouri; and Washington, D.C."
I don't' see SF or LA mentioned here. I'm sure some of these are Democrat controlled but You are claiming that liberal policies cause an increase in overdoses. Do you have a source for your death rates?
https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2022/04/06/dea-warns-incr...
------------------------------
Top 10 states by drug overdose in 2020 (latest year for this source)
West Virginia 81.4 1,330 Kentucky 49.2 2,083 Delaware 47.3 444 Ohio 47.2 5,204 Tennessee 45.6 3,034 Maryland 44.6 2,771 Louisiana 42.7 1,896 Pennsylvania 42.4 5,168 Maine 39.7 496 Connecticut 39.1 v1,371
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...
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"We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress."
Ant-conservative backlash? Republicans, as in elected officials, are calling their political opponents pedophiles and communists. They claim guns are going to be taken away for the last 40 years guess what actually gets banned? Abortion. Multiple Republicans are still lying about election fraud and you wonder why there's a backlash?
I'm generally not in the USA so I'm trying to speak of things more internationally, and broader than just the divisive Dem/Rep mob.
And no, the backlash I'm talking about is the last eighty or more years. The hippies are boomers, after all.
> Top 10 states by drug overdose ...
I'm not talking about deaths but deaths that society encourages. What would happen in that area if you tried to shoot up in front of a cop?
> there's no fentanyl distribution that I can see. Care to provide a source?
The programs aren't very well documented because they're "just" a doctor treating their patients, many of whom they never meet. The newspaper articles aren't great. Here's a transcript of the Alberta government examining Vancouver's drug situation for the purposes of setting their own policies. There are also other days of testimony and citizen input if you look around. https://docs.assembly.ab.ca/LADDAR_files/docs/committees/ess...
> The drug is extremely potent to be consumed alone.
Yeah. The dealers intentionally kill a few every now and then as an ad for their product and they manipulate the potency in competition with other dealers. The police warn non drug users that a cheap street dose is many times more likely to kill an inexperienced user than a similar dose from a decade ago.
"The police warn non drug users that a cheap street dose is many times more likely to kill an inexperienced user than a similar dose from a decade ago."
This is a conspiracy theory. Evidence?
And about your first comment, I'm showing numbers of deaths, you're claiming that some part of that is encouraged and that percentage is higher for liberal cities. But the death rate doesn't correlate either way. So it doesn't make sense, even if it was encouraged apparently it's not making things worse
Most of what you said is speculation and you haven't provided meaningful evidence besides linking to a paper in another country.
Because the cities literally follow the same public policy. Don't arrest for "simple usage", camping on the streets is allowed, etc. They're getting advice from the same people. But yes, the USA does not that I know, have vending machines for drugs yet, that's still afaik a Canadian thing. In the USA you have to go to a "clinic" and ask a worker for your dose by hand and generally they want you to consume the drug there.
> [Street doses growing in strength] is a conspiracy theory.
Not even a little. I'm not talking about the why or the who. When tested the bags sold contain more active drug and many first-time users are reported dying when generally opioids (read erowid, etc) don't do that.
> Evidence?
Your googling fingers are busted but the ones you use to complain are working?
> Most of what you said is speculation and you haven't provided meaningful evidence besides linking to a paper
No, I've provided enough evidence to show that things are run by people who don't know what they're doing and are misrepresenting the studies to the city. If you can't find the public documents talking about your own cities you aren't trying hard enough.
> in another country.
Lol, so sorry the world doesn't end at your borders.
It's not my job in a debate to provide evidence for your arguments
"Lol, so sorry the world doesn't end at your borders."
We are discussing American politics
We're also discussing drugs and the lib/con divide which aren't in the article either. I didn't respond to you originally, you responded to me which means you adopt the discussion at that point - or did you intend to reply elsewhere?
Also, this is how you stay uninformed. Refusing to look to countries who are a few years ahead of you on a policy cycle. Drugs are drugs no matter the country.
> [not my job] to provide evidence for your arguments
You don't have to. I fully supported my argument, it's not my fault you can't read Canadian.
It's as valid for me to quote Vancouver as a model for SF and LA as it was for Vancouver to reference Amsterdam twenty years ago.
Here's just one set of statistics-Most Murders 2022
St. Louis, MO (69.4)
Baltimore, MD (51.1)
New Orleans, LA (40.6)
Detroit, MI (39.7)
Cleveland, OH (33.7)
Las Vegas, NV (31.4)
Kansas City, MO (31.2)
Memphis, TN (27.1)
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-wi...
Additionally, politics and policies exist at the national level as well and can influence what happens in even liberal cities.
The ‘clearances paradox’: could less policing actually reduce gun violence in New York?
Your over simplifying the complex reasons behind crime.
Violent antisocial behaviour presents itself in a small percentage of young (mostly) males. It can be predicted as early as age 4 and effective intervention is very difficult. Most people who present with it tend to age out of the behaviour by around 30. Therefore the only effective strategy to protect the rest of us from this tiny fraction of people is to confine them until they age out. This is basically what our criminal justice system does, however imperfectly.
If we were to design a system eyes-open, knowing these constraints, with the goal of minimizing violent crime, we'd:
1. Enact age-based confinement - teenagers who present with violent antisocialism are very likely to reoffend in their 20s. Violent teenagers and young adults should be confined until they've aged out.
2. Structure prison culture - prison should not be crime university. Criminals should not be permitted to form a culture. Violent antisocialism should not be tolerated in prison. Instead they should be given the tools to find a legitimate place in society upon their eventual release. Japan does this quite well.
3. Seal records after release - criminal records relating to youth-associated violent antisocialism should be sealed. People we release should have a clear path to reintegration without discrimination.
That won't fix everything, of course. People will get involved in crime for other reasons. Obviously there are rich people who are criminals; financial security doesn't remove every temptation to do crime. But I think a lot of the people you label "antisocial" these days are people who have been left behind by society, people who have gotten crushed by wages that haven't kept up with inflation (even before the current inflation issues), by companies who raise CEO pay and send dividends to investors, while ignoring the wages of their employees. Why would anyone bother to be "social" if doing so doesn't solve their economic insecurity?
And sure, there are some people who just don't give a shit about living in polite society, who don't think twice about violating norms and taking what they want. I have no problem locking those people up. But I think those people are a much smaller percentage of people who commit crimes than you think.
I don't know much about policing in Israel, but as I understand Japan, there's rampant corruption and a lot of innocent people behind bars. A near-100% conviction rate is just too good to be true. If you get charged with a crime in Japan, you are screwed, even if you didn't do anything wrong. The only alternative explanation is that Japanese police are so afraid of losing a case that they only charge the near-certain slam dunks. But if that were the case, I think we'd see a lot more crime in Japan than we do. So the only realistic explanation is that a lot of innocent people get steamrolled.
I do absolutely agree with your points 2 and 3. Time spent in prison should not make convicts into better criminals! Hell, even sitting in pre-trial detention for a few months can harden minor offenders. And after a prisoner has served their time, they shouldn't have that history dragged into employment, housing, credit, etc. decisions. If we still feel like they can't be trusted in jobs without their employers knowing about their conviction history, then they probably aren't fit to be released from prison in the first place.
These are not mutually exclusive propositions. As I mentioned in my comment, there are two concerns here:
1. Reducing the number of violent antisocial people by reducing the number of people who are exposed to childhood circumstances that tend to produce them. This is complicated and entails dictating to parents how they raise their children to a much higher degree than most people are comfortable, and than our society's values permit.
2. Dealing with the ones who already exist. This is policing and justice.
> the people you label "antisocial" these days are people who have been left behind by society
> It's the economy, stupid
If only it were this simple. I'm referring to people who haven't been correctly socialized in their early childhood. Toddlers are all violent, self centered, assholes by adult standards. They learn not to be through appropriate socialization with their peers, through play. Children who are not given this developmental opportunity past a particular age tend to exhibit traits that strongly correlate with violence in early adulthood. This is exacerbated by numerous domestic factors, most importantly the absence of two parents in the household and the presence of violent antisocial adults in the household (not household income).
We can observe these same traits and behaviours develop in our ape relatives for the same reasons. We're not that different.
> I think those people are a much smaller percentage of people who commit crimes than you think
This just isn't true - this small percentage of people are the serial criminals responsible for most of the real danger in our society - shootings, armed home invasions, armed robberies, etc. These sorts of crimes are largely not committed by people who are "down and out", but by people who are in many ways fundamentally different from the average person. I'm not talking about petty theft here.
This can be most clearly illustrated by the phenomenon of college campus rape. The rapes themselves are committed by a tiny fraction of repeat offenders. "Teach men not to rape" doesn't work on them. They're just not like most people, mostly as a result of some combination of tragic childhood circumstances and poor socialization (again, not household wealth). The best solution is to identify these people and imprison them as efficiently as possible. To enact this solution effectively, the people we entrust with it need power.
This is a tired trope.
The question is just — what type of injustice do you prefer?
This seems like the most reasonable solution. If you believe that systemic racism exists in the background, then this corrects for its real effects. If you don’t, I’m sure you at least accept that all else equal, a smart poor person will have accomplished less than a smart rich person due to lack of resources, so if you can correct for that in admissions you better identify smart people.
Need-oriented discrimination, with no accounting for race, is the answer
In the welfare days, those that were in more need were women with children where the man ditched the family. So more effort and money was applied there which seems totally reasonable.
But it also incentivized men to leave their families to qualify, and they did in high numbers.
These type of things made to correct something in the past also have a tendency to incentivize something bad in the future.
This is part of why these things are so difficult in practice.
These selection criteria are meant to match students with schools filled with students of the same ability level. Of course there will always be factors in life that make it harder or easier for people to succeed.
Having had exceptionally difficult life circumstances doesn't somehow change the fact that you need to have already mastered Algebra to succeed at MIT for example.
We should focus more on mitigating the extent that difficult circumstances hinders learning not just manipulating selection criteria after it already has.
Someone with an IQ of 140 but poor might not have accomplished as much as a rich person with an IQ of 100, so on paper the rich person looks better, but correcting for circumstances the poor (smart) person is wayyy better. This is meritocratic.
And I’m certainly not suggesting you take the objectively worst person, especially in a job market. Universities are given public money to provide societal benefits. If they aren’t properly able to give people opportunities, they don’t deserve my tax dollars.
The problem is that we have never actually done that. "Legacy admissions" is a fine example of that failure. Large donations influence admissions decisions. Biases (unconscious or conscious) can take two people of equal merit and cause an admissions officer to prefer one over the other.
There have already been studies showing that simply changing a person's name (either to present a different gender or race/national origin) on a resume can result in a different hiring decision.
A purpose of all of these equity initiatives is to compensate for the reasons why we already suck at giving people opportunities based on merit. Some of them are ill-advised and end up not working, but that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up and accept the status quo.
And I certainly don't expect us to wave a magic wand and turn ourselves into perfectly rational, unbiased robots who actually do select purely on merit. Which wouldn't even fix the problem, anyway. But I feel like people like you who tout this "merit" thing are also pushing something impossible to accomplish.
This is harder, but I agree the right place to focus our energies. The problem is that the people that want to solve the problem are those in higher education. The people at the root of the problem are probably the same ones that don't want to solve it. A bit of a catch-22.
Does it?
Might be time to check more than one of your assumptions, but more importantly, stop trying to police what I and others here say. I’m an adult, if you don’t wish to engage further that’s up to you but I and the others on these boards can make our own decisions, and there are moderators for when things get out of hand. Thanks.
“unless you plan to force me.” Jesus wept.
Discriminating on the basis of race for these programs is so stupid. Ask why and people say “because socioeconomic status”, but then why don’t you discriminate on that? I think people know this but it’s a political move (black people vote for democrats for the vast majority, so making it means tested instead wouldn’t be popular with them).
I think a lot of bad faith prevarication prevents any improvement (such as the question I was replying to).
Elaborate, and make it good.
[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
[1] https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/
[2] https://edsource.org/2022/as-supreme-court-considers-affirma...
Or in essence, how to address the historical inequities of racism and sexism, without also ushering in something ridiculous like "mentalism" that attempts to help people who are "bad at tests and grades."
And an effective part of that litmus test could be 'already has substantial power, but is able to self-restrain their abuse of it.'
Caligula vs the recent British monarchy, etc.
That doesn't excuse the actual racism that we've seen in admissions, of course.
Colleges should be about furthering academic knowledge and preparing our best and brightest to make the world a better place. Diversity for diversities sake harms that.
Who are the best and brightest? How do you determine that?
Do the best&brightest from one community or circumstance always have the same traits as the best&brightest from another community or circumstance?
My understanding is diversity initiatives attempt to address the latter part (effective or not).
Can the answer to this question be "yes"? In the same way that the best NBA players share traits, I don't see any reason why the best physicians, engineers, etc. also wouldn't share traits across cultures/backgrounds.
Going further, can't we measure these traits with outcomes of standardized testing? Given you agree these traits exist, can you propose an better alternative?
So what would you say is “not good” about a “student body made up of too [many]” Indians? Or Jews? Or Chinese people?
Are schools in India or China or Israel inherently worse than those in America because those schools have “too much” of a single race?
Both China and India are countries with a number of different races, some/most of which are represented at the top schools (I imagine all of the large racial groups). I’m not sure about Israel, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true there as well.
That said, the prestigious schools in these countries (not sure about Israel) heavily use tests as an admission standard to the best schools. I think that this is part of what makes them less prestigious than their American counterparts.
Elite American universities use social capital as part the admissions criteria, with a reasonably broad definition of social capital. I think that this social capital along with intellectual capital (not always in the same student) is part of what makes the magic work at these schools.
Notes:
- In China (and probably other places), historically the admissions exam was a proxy for social capital, since families with high social capital could prepare their kids better via tutors. This is still somewhat true today, but it’s not as powerful as it was in the distant past.
- State schools in the US, which seem to be the focus of this article since they don’t have a history of holistic admissions, should probably stick with a grades-test score combo for most admissions, and maybe add some “social capital” admits (similar to athletes, who also fall into the social capital category, with the extent of exceptionalism required being equivalent).
- Schools that admit based on tests alone without having some sort of built-in social capital component will end up defaulting towards the creation of a lot of middle management drones rather than future leaders of the country. Many people seem to wish that social capital is not the primary driver of success, but results (historical and anecdotal) seem to suggest otherwise.
The only logical reason for discriminating against so many Asians in our current setup needs to be attempting to mirror the population statistics of the United States. I don’t approve of that logic to be clear and think the universities will be issuing apologies to the Asian American community in X years similar to the ones they just made to the Jewish American community recently.
-years later-
OH no, we're taking the pr hits for our disgustingly discriminative and biggoted admissions processes.
I can completely believe that this is the result, but I find it very hard to believe that it is (at least in all cases) the point. At my university, the decision to stop considering some standardized tests came from the department and college level, where we don't even make the decisions, not from the admissions department. While it is easy for me to believe that there were unintended consequences, I can say for sure that what you describe was not our goal.
Additionally, at least when one goes by the original purpose of academia - that is, to provide education and research opportunities to the actually gifted instead of yet another way for employers to bypass ADA and other anti discrimination regulations - it should be the way that qualitative judgements by humans prefer the academically gifted and interested!
You're not wrong, but I interpret this as evidence that the problem is earlier in the pipeline and trying to fix it here is a hack.
They select for math ability, it just so happens that students with access to great resources get better at math than those without them.
> The result is that the student base will be overwhelmingly white rich kids, which is pretty problematic Pretty clearly not true. It is overwhelmingly asian kids and while wealth plays a factor, poor asians still do exceptionally well (IIRC poor asians do better than rich whites). This can never be acknowledged because it makes people less sympathetic to your point.
> purpose of academia - that is, to provide education and research opportunities to the actually gifted instead
A students innate ability is irrelevant for college admissions. What matters is what are your actual capabilities. Are you capable doing mathematics at the highest level or are you not? An innately talented student who is bad at math due to life circumstances out of their control is still bad at math.
So we just throw our hands up and lament that those without preexisting opportunities stay down?
I completely disagree. Colleges should be looking for high ceiling students who have the potential to do great things if the college throws their resources at the kid for four years.
> A students innate ability is irrelevant for college admissions. What matters is what are your actual capabilities. Are you capable doing mathematics at the highest level or are you not?
Last time I checked, the whole point of college is to develop these skills!
Should every single person who didn't get to take advanced math in high school be immediately disqualified from studying high level math, even if they have the potential to do incredibly well given the tools? This isn't to say that students who have the foundation should be kept down, more that those without it shouldn't be excluded if they have the potential to succeed.