The secret joke at the heart of the Harvard affirmative-action case | Hacker News Reader

The secret joke at the heart of the Harvard affirmative-action case

newyorker.com

149 pointsfortran77260 comments

The whole "holistic review" crap should be banned. It was originally invented to reduce the number of Jewish people [1]. It is still being used for illegal or illicit discrimination of one kind or another.

This article [2] says "holistic review" is subterfuge... it is how colleges make admission decisions based on factors they would rather not talk about.

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...

It's a hard problem and anyone who says it's easy (including "just look at SAT/GPA!!") shouldn't be taken seriously.

The problem with SAT, GPA is that once everyone knows what you're measuring, they optimize for that measure, and it loses its meaning.

Of ten kids with no particular extra tutoring over what they got in their average public school, SAT and GPA are going to tell you a lot about underlying aptitude.

Have one of those kid's parents send the kid to a bunch of extra tutoring, and it ruins the ability to do the comparison.

Have every kid get all that exact same level of tutoring and it's back to an even playing field, but you've managed to ruin everyone's childhood.

And you might've beaten a lot of creativity and other useful-for-real-life but less useful for mass-produced-college-education skills out of them.

Today we're somewhere in between - well-off kids often get the helicopter-parent-study-to-the-test short-term-maximization childhood; less well-off ones do not.

So you need a new metric, or some secret sauce, but the secret sauce is only useful if it's secret. And if it's secret, it's hard to tell if it's legitimately trying to value the right things...

If we were starting schools greenfield it might make sense to just let them all do whatever they want, and then see how their graduates do, but... we're saddled with a lot of legacy shit from existing wealth, past wrongs, etc, that make that real tough.

And then some people put crazy expectations on colleges to do things like fix those historical problems, too, when in reality so much damage to some kids prospects are done WAY earlier: https://crookedtimber.org/2023/02/06/can-college-level-the-p...

> well-off kids often get the helicopter-parent-study-to-the-test short-term-maximization childhood; less well-off ones do not.

This criticism of standardized tests is ubiquitous, but what never, ever seems to be discussed is whether holistic review of many facets actually improves this problem or simply entrenches the well-off further.

Say you're a poor, smart kid who works to support a dysfunctional family. You want to go to a life-changing school. Would you rather prove your potential by simply taking a test, perhaps along with a brief note about your disadvantaged background, or would you rather have to submit materials reflecting ten different dimensions of yourself, all of which the wealthy have hired armies of consultants to optimize for them, and networks of insiders to feed them knowledge of what the schools want to see?

We don't have to answer that because the schools have never asked. It was never their goal to get poor students in the first place, and income statistics of admits at Ivies show this clearly.

In practice the wealthy and connected are likely to be somewhat advantaged either way. Whatever system you set up is going to get gamed, whether that means having someone ghostwrite/coach their admissions essays, exaggerate their recommendation letters, prep them (or even help them cheat) on admissions tests, train them in exclusive sports, help them obtain experiences inaccessible to other students such as working in a research laboratory or visiting exotic places, or just directly bribe the school with cash. But IMO you still have to try to push back against those games.

The purely test-based system is absolutely ruinous for some kinds of ambitious parents’ children. Look at the childhoods of kids growing up in e.g. South Korea or some Chinese social classes. It’s nonstop test prep from morning to night starting from age 3 or 4 through the end of high school. Sure some of the kids who succeed in that system are “working hard for it”, but at what cost?

And while one particular extraordinary disadvantaged kid might succeed in that system, it’s not any kind of general recipe for social mobility or fixing large-scale social justice problems.

Best thing is probably something straightforward that can't be gamed like a difficult to game SAT. Instead we have a complicated set of criteria that can basically only be gamed by rich people. Worst case scenario if you are are poor and want to get into one of these colleges.

The simplest thing is to allow anyone to attend and simply kick them out when they show that they can't hack it.

While I agree in principle, I don’t think this would easily work at super prestigious schools like Harvard, since there would be far too many applicants.

Harvard has about 1700 undergraduates per class (total undergraduate population ~7000), with an acceptance rate of 4%. That means they get around 40,000 applicants for each freshman class. Harvard’s matriculation rate is around 80%, so we can conservatively assume that somewhat less of those 40,000 applicants would enroll in your proposed trial period, say 50%.

Even if the weed-out period was just the first semester of freshman year, how would it handle an influx of 20,000 additional undergrads for that single semester? For reference, Harvard’s entire student body (including all graduate/professional degree students) is around 30,000.

Just accept a random 4%.

> The purely test-based system is absolutely ruinous for some kinds of ambitious parents’ children. Look at the childhoods of kids growing up in e.g. South Korea or some Chinese social classes.

It's not the test doing that, it's the parents. If it weren't a test they'd target whatever else is being used as the evaluation metric.

Push back? The schools created this game. This is how they justify admitting mostly the wealthy.

It's how they worked back in the 20s too, when they needed a way to exclude poor Jewish students who were acing their admissions tests.

The impact of test prep is commonly overstated.

According to Washington Post and Slate, both being rather progressive, SAT prep might improve scores 10-20 points on average, with greater effect on the math section. There is a paper on the ACT website suggesting 30-60 points.

Downward adjustments for high performing demographics can be double that.

A cup of coffee would probably see similar or better improvements than test prep.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...

https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...

https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R171...

Khan Academy claims that doing their test prep is associated with a 115-point increase. Fortunately, their test prep is free, and is usable by anyone with access to a computer/phone/library.

I don't know about the SAT prep specifically, but much of their content is also downloadable for offline use, which is pretty cool.

Among admits, there are small differences in actual test scores especially among whites and Asians.[1] Also, there are racial gaps among actually using SAT prep.[2] Whites may actually be the least likely to use test prep courses depending on which source you look at.[3] I guess if you are applying to Harvard, test prep could actually be pretty significant.

When Harvard makes it decisions, test prep could actually be a major factor in admission there since scores are so close(assuming the numbers you gave). Especially since they try to reach out to people in different regions of the US.

[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/widget/2018/10/21/sat-by-race-gra...

[2]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283121142560...

[3]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/th...

The Slate article says the points effect is modest but also that a few points make a big difference to college admissions at the selective schools.

I also question how the controlling is done. The control group does better seemingly from doing the test more. You'd think that's one of the things that shouldn't be controlled for. After all isn't it part of test prep?

This statement just does not match reality.

Do you have any studies showing the opposite?

Do you think school also doesn’t help sat scores?

> Have every kid get all that exact same level of tutoring and it's back to an even playing field, but you've managed to ruin everyone's childhood

Spending a summer studying for the SAT is both more approachable and less disruptive to childhood than putting together a bunch of bullshit extracirrculars.

Spending a summer studying for the SAT is a 100% waste of time, with no redeeming value whatsoever beyond playing an admissions game. Every hour that students collectively spend on SAT prep is an hour thrown away, not spent on some activity with more social/personal value. People encouraging all students to spend hours on this are effectively advocating an extra uncompensated time tax on high school students. It’s grotesque, especially considering students are already forced to spend thousands of hours in school.

“Extracurricular” activities are only bullshit if you make them so. Otherwise, the whole point of “extracurricular” activity is that it is outside of the curriculum, based on students’ personal choices about how to spend their time. There are thousands of worthwhile ways to spend time outside of school, and no particular “bullshit” choice is forced on anyone. (Indeed, admissions officers are more interested in the students who find their own interesting things to do vs. do stuff they think is bullshit but are told to do by their parents or others.)

The equivalent of the kind of personally edifying extracurricular activity you’re talking about would be actually reading a lot and doing a lot of math, and then just doing well on the SAT using your actual knowledge. If you’re the kind of kid who would do that then great, just like if you’re the kind of kid who naturally becomes #1 at archery or something then great. Most kids are not like that, and it is assumed that whatever the criteria for admission is, most people will be gaming it. From that perspective, the extracurriculars game is way more time consuming, money consuming, and more bullshit.

> actually reading a lot and doing a lot of math, and then just doing well on the SAT using your actual knowledge

Yes, this is what we should encourage kids to do. It is both more interesting/meaningful and more effective than test prep per se, because it better accords with how human brains store and process information. The skills learned are also dramatically more transferrable to other tasks/activities, and much more valuable to society.

Test prep is a pathetic substitute for actually learning things.

It doesn’t take a special kind of person to learn and do things for their own sake. Every child naturally behaves this way. It just takes a society/culture that values humanity and learning not to smash those kids’ basic curiosity by the time they get to high school age.

That's fine, but we should compare apples with apples: actual-learning SAT prep with actual-learning extracurriculars, or cram-school SAT prep with cram-school extracurriculars.

I agree with you that this sort of mission of self-actualization for kids is a laudable goal. I personally hated school and spent 12-18 blowing off boring coursework to indulge my curiosity with computers. In that ideal world, I'd say it's a tossup between whether reading/math or exploratory hobbies are more important (probably depends on the person). But in the world we live in, where kids are burdened with the reality of practical concerns, especially the ones for whom college is supposed to be their ticket to social advancement — in other words, in the world where it's a given that kids are going to be doing meaningless hoop-jumping — the SAT tends to be, I think, a much more reasonable hoop to jump through than faking extracurriculars and "holistic" merit. Like 'rayiner says, a summer of studying, versus four years of starting fake clubs, doing various competitions, trips to third world countries, volunteer work, collecting awards across various hobbies, and whatever else is on the checklist now (these were the things in my day).

You don’t have to start fake clubs, take trips, volunteer, collect awards, or whatever else if you don’t want to though. Claims that some particular assortment of these is necessary an invention by parents/whoever who can’t conceive of time spent and choices made for reasons other than winning some game.

Activities like music/debate/programming/sport contests, tutoring younger kids, performing science experiments, hacking on computers, getting short stories published, working a part-time job, working for a political campaign, or whatever else have some intrinsic value/interest and are not just meaningless busywork for many (most?) of their participants.

In my experience the kids who pick one or two things they find personally interesting and pursue those out of real excitement end up significantly more successful in the admissions "game" than the kids who spend every waking moment trying to play it as a game per se. While also having a better time. And this is not because they are any inherently smarter or more motivated or whatever.

Rayiner almost always comes across to me as a cynic whose main goal is running up his family’s score in the money-earning game and who looks down on anyone with humanistic goals as merely an unsuccessful fellow cynic. Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s my persistent impression comment after comment, year after year. YMMV.

> less well-off ones do not.

False.

I don't get why people keep pretending like less well off children do not have access to this.

People like me growing up needed this as an avenue as this was often times one of the only avenues available to the less fortunate for standing out.

We don't have access to other privileged activities that holistic reviews love.

People that want to take this away from us are short sighted and demonstrative of how the privileged have no idea what the impact their policies have on the people they ostensibly want to help.

At the end of the day, yes there are a lot of rich kids who get helicopter parented and sent to ivy leagues and they perpetuate the system of benefitting the few who have the most resources in life. But quite a few kids who are less fortunate, perhaps a bad combination of less fortunate with terrible homelifes who have little chance to succeed in school, are able to move to fairly high quality state schools after doing a couple years at what are usually free, if not incredibly affordable community colleges.

The problem is with the existence of colleges like the Ivys, or MIT, or any other massive private research university. There is no sense in schools like this holding so much wealth with their disgustingly large endowments. Why can't these schools be broken up, or, better yet, nationalized (or turned into state schools)? The problem is not affirmative action or prep-school kids, but the very existence of these massive, corrupt institutions which function increasingly not so much as halls of education but hedge-funds for the ultra-wealthy.

How much does tutoring raise an SAT score typically?

How can this be a defense of the "holistic" admission process?

Its as if you are defending "holistic" medicine by saying that actual medicine can't cure cancer. (But of course holistic medicine can't either)

Holistic review can still exist on the basis of impartial factors subject to quantitative analysis. The strength of the SFFA case is that there's no way the numbers the public or perhaps even the plaintiffs have privileged access to can avoid reasonable doubt that quotas exist in the current system. That's why many top colleges have recently announced they will stop requiring SAT scores, because the data on their racial breakdown can be easily obtained.

> many top colleges have recently announced they will stop requiring SAT scores

What will they use instead? SAT scores do a good job of predicting success in college.

In theory, other measures of student achievement: grades, extracurricular activities, personal statements, letters of recommendation. GPA by itself isn't terrible for this, though pairing it with test scores is an improvement over both it by itself and test scores by themselves for prediction of academic success in college.

In practice: things that satisfy ideological goals and maximize fundraising outlook for the institution.

According to a professor I know, the average quality/preparedness of students has dropped with the removal of the SAT where he teaches. A high SAT score was never going to get you accepted to a good school, but a low SAT score used to get you rejected. Removing that filter makes room for less objective measures (I know the SAT isn't particularly objective either) to get more weight.

To be clear, I strongly oppose removal of SATs as a metric used to evaluate candidates.

That said, there's a confounder here: schools which remove SATs as an admissions metric are schools that are looking for different things than academic preparedness/quality. It's likely that they're using methods and rubrics to deemphasize the predictive quality of GPAs as well.

GPA is fairly objective (though less so than the SAT) and predictive (more so than the SAT) as a standard. Accounting for the courses taken and the high schools the courses are taught at, you could select a class purely based on grades that is highly qualified and prepared (and incidentally would also have high SAT scores; GPA and SAT are correlated). But a university removing the SAT from admissions is also likely to be trying deemphasize the component of GPA that's predictive of quality as well.

To add one thing here: the professor in question is at a school in the top 20 worldwide. Almost every applicant had a basically perfect GPA from high school, but some of them had SAT scores that were 70th percentile or below. The SAT seems to "scale up" to that market much better than GPA as a predictor.

Right; GPA is a coarse representation of performance on coursework. A 4.0 at Stuy with coursework on real analysis and organic chemistry means something very different than a 4.0 at a struggling inner city public school where the hardest math class is Algebra 2.

My point is more that universities can (and do!) create a different representation of coursework performance that accounts for rigor. But a university that eliminates the SAT is also likely intentionally making that representation less predictive of undergraduate performance to allow weighing of things more than preparedness/quality as indicated by grades.

What makes SATs so important is that you get a very limited preparedness signal from kids with 4.0 at the crappy school; combining test scores with GPA allows for a selective school to get a much more meaningful signal for quality/preparedness.

My motivation here is to push back against the scores alone are enough idea, though it's an understandable reaction to the people who by all appearances think quality/academic preparedness should be a secondary concern in admissions.

According to the recent "Task Force on Standardized Testing" from the UCs (https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/... page 23) SATs are better predictors than GPAs for most demographics, although both together is unsurprisingly better than either alone.

This seems natural to me, as GPA seems inherently less objective (different schools, different teachers).

I think it's fairly strange that universities are getting rid of using them. One explanation is that it helps protect them from lawsuits like those against Harvard, as there is less incriminating evidence. I fail to see how it actually helps students.

> extracurricular activities, personal statements, letters of recommendation

These are just selection for middle-classness.

I would say upper to middle-upper class.

depending on which extracurricular activities, always some activity that most of people can't effort it, it is a indicator for distinguishing rich.

DEI points will replace SAT scores. (DEI = Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).

Don't send your kids to extra math classes, send them to extra Spanish classes so they can plausibly tick the Hispanic box!

You don't need to speak Spanish to be Hispanic! [0] [1]

There are many White and Asian people who tick the Hispanic box, thanks to Hispanic-sounding names... Often at the suggestion of their high school counselor.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/why-dont-...

[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/society/latinidad-spanish-...

> quotas exist

This is kind of a nitpick but the SFFA case doesn't try to argue that there are racial quotas, instead, they argue that whites, specifically, are admitted where Asians should be. This, despite whites being the only race that is accepted disproportionately less relative to their general population percentage.

SFFA doesn't attempt to say anything about other racial categories but that Harvard has designed backdoors to admit whites at the expense of Asians. The case may not have any impact on racial quotas or affirmative action if it wins. If it wins, there will just be fewer white people admitted I assume.

I agree that much of their use of "holistic" factors is simple discrimination and should be illegal, but considering other non-academic factors (arguably including character) seems reasonable, if not necessary, given the intent of these schools to build future leaders in various fields.

Quantitative measures can only give you so much information about a student. GPA is questionably useful past a point, where it starts to have more to do with grade inflation and gaming the system than differences in hard work or ability.

That leaves the SAT, which is far more of a level playing field than things like extracurriculars or "personal statements" that also end up reflecting your social class and ability to play the admissions game more than ability. Yet admitting students based solely on a single standardized test seems to disincentivize working hard at other pursuits that may actually bring more to the classroom than slightly higher test scores.

If there is a magical way to gauge character in a short amount of time then sure, however I doubt most people will do any better than a coin flip when asked to predict the "character" of someone without having known the person deeply.

> If there is a magical way to gauge character in a short amount of time then sure

This is key. Many universities that claim to do "holistic reviews" don't have the time or resources to actually do holistic reviews. University of Washington is an example. UW gives application reviewers 8 minutes per application. And who are these reviewers? Do they have the knowledge and experience to do a "holistic review" in 8 minutes, including reading essays and personal statements and so on? Nope! They hire grad students, retirees etc. to act as application reviewers [1].

[1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/a-look-inside-admis...

Character gauging is basically does the prospective student show enough characteristics that upper middle class people have.

The thing is, getting into a top level school requires maximizing all of GPA, SATs, and what might be called "extracurricular appeal"; this crowds out a bunch of different pursuits, more so than grinding test-taking ability (which has rapidly decreasing marginal returns) alone would. You might hope that those different pursuits being crowded out would instead feed into increased extracurricular appeal, but in practice there's a very particular subset of things that universities care about when it comes to extracurriculars. Indeed, some of them (like leadership activities in 4H, ROTC, or Future Farmers of America) actually hurt your chances of admission, which seems insane if you're looking for a variety of impressive individuals who can bring diverse perspectives.

If I were dictator of college admissions across the US, I'd use tests and GPA to coarsely bucket individuals (into basically capable of doing the work or not at each institution), and use a lottery to distribute spots where demand outstrips supply.

> The whole "holistic review" crap should be banned.

I'd very strongly disagree with this. If you just use grades then you are benefiting the rich to a very high degree. As the rich can pay any amount for tutors and the kids don't need to work, hence being able to use a far higher amount of their waking time for studying than someone who needs to work can.

Other factors should be factored into admissions. But the moment you agree that grades alone should be the only determination of who you allow in then you are by definition back to holistic admittance requirements.

How would you balance who to let in between a kid who has tutors and no job who gets higher marks than a kid who has to work to feed their family and has lower marks if you don't have a holistic review process?

Grades alone just doesn't seem fair and would only make wealth inequality worse as the rich get richer and the poor would fall further behind.

The idea that "holistic" admissions is used to benefit teens working to support their family is not realistic. An Asian-American kid who spends most of his waking hours doing deliveries to help keep his parents' struggling Chinese restaurant afloat is absolutely not getting admitted to Harvard, even if he is a valedictorian with a perfect SAT score. In practice, holistic admissions means admitting students who wouldn't otherwise be admitted in order to satisfy admissions officers' ideological or financial goals.

> Asian-American kid who spends most of his waking hours doing deliveries to help keep his parents' struggling Chinese restaurant afloat

Nor the white kid in Iowa helping on the farm.

Significant that only one of these kids are being evaluated by the Supreme Court though.

Unfortunately, the law currently treats “white” people as a single group, ignoring the cultural and indeed ethnic differences within the group. Harvard is racist against German-descended midwesterners just as it’s racist against Asians, and for many of the same reasons.

ANY statistic other than race can be gamed by rich families. It seems like it would at least be harder for a rich teenager to game a standardized test, as no matter what study is required.

Compare this to political activism, prestigious internships, club membership, and other “holistic” application line items. Poor teenagers have no realistic way to build up these items for their application, especially if they’re working at Burger King after school.

The suspicious part of me feels that dropping standardized testing from applications is just a way to get MORE rich, advantaged legacy kids in the door.

> other than race

I once met a hard-working, Hispanic first generation immigrant.

By that I mean, he was ethnically white, born and raised in Spain and moved to the US when he was 8 because his father got a job in the Valley.

> If you just use grades then you are benefiting the rich to a very high degree. As the rich can pay any amount for tutors and the kids don't need to work, hence being able to use a far higher amount of their waking time for studying than someone who needs to work can.

So what? Even if it's unfair that some group of people were able to study more and have better teachers, the fact is they are better educated people--fair or not.

What about taking someone who is significantly less educated/prepared due to unfortunate circumstances in their first 18 years of life is made right by thrusting them into an environment where they're unprepared to compete for 4 years?

I say this as one of these people. I should not have been admitted to the school I went to. I got a terrible GPA my first year that progressively improved over the course of the years, but even after catching up to the Exeter students by my senior year, my GPA was shit from being averaged out with the first couple years. There are plenty more people in my same position who decided to just bow out of the competition, and studied subjects where they weren't forced to compete with the well-educated magnet/prep schoolers.

> As the rich can pay any amount for tutors and the kids don't need to work

The rich can pay any amount for a professional to write their entire college essay, milking every diversity advantage they’ve got, send their kids to collect awards in every extracurricular activity under the sun, and take annual summer trips to third world countries to collect subject matter to write about.

Every concern that you have is literally way worse when you change the metric from grades to some other more nebulous metric. At least a poor kid with a 140 IQ can get good grades and a 1570 on the SAT. He can’t take summer trips to Africa so he can write about the orphanage he helped start or something.

> How would you balance who to let in between a kid who has tutors and no job who gets higher marks than a kid who has to work to feed their family and has lower marks if you don't have a holistic review process?

Give a bonus to kids with low parental income/assets.

You think they're using 'holistic review' to disadvantage the rich?

A college that literally has a legacy admission policy?

You need to separate the types of rich. Yes, if your family is rich enough to name a Harvard building, you'll be in the legacy admissions pipeline, but for those who are merely upper middle class, they have a much higher chance of getting in via only test scores than those who don't have the means to hire outside tutors for their children.

Legacy at top schools means if your parents went there, you are fast tracked to admissions. It matters a lot. More than test scores.

If you are in that group, you have way higher chance of admission. TBC, you still need high test scores.

The point here is that good test scores and grades prob won’t get you in today unless you are legacy or a preferred group.

I'd recommend reading those that disagree with race-based admission (Jason Riley for example) as to why it tends to be a bad idea.

My take on the argument against what you are saying is that it is effectively lowering the standards for certain groups of people to get in. This can 1 of 2 effects:

(1) those that are admitted to a college where the standards expected of their students are higher will mean that these lower-performing people will fail out.

(2) the university either lowers the standards for all, or creates specific majors that are "easier" for people to attempt to be able to graduate.

Neither of these are good options.

Guess what? Life isn't fair. Kids that grew up in a family that promotes education and learning will perform better in these high-tier colleges (on average). The reason is that the kids were able to (or forced to) perform to certain standards much earlier on in life (see Tiger Moms). Kids with parents that don't have the time (or care) to focus on a child's education will obvious not have the same skills/training at 18 compared to some others. Does this make them less smart? Nope! These kids can still be served very well by lower-tier colleges where they can still learn a lot and develop their skills. They just aren't as prepped for certain universities.

If we want our society to continue to be a meritocracy, holistic review needs to DIAF.

I think I agree with most of what you wrote, especially race based administration.

But I have a hard time thinking that grades alone is the best determinant of who should get into university, but the moment you use anything other than straight up grades, you are back to a holistic process, which the OP claims is worse.

> As the rich can pay any amount for tutors and the kids don't need to work

Kids don't need to work? The tutors will take the test for them? Not true.

Also, the best tutoring for SAT is Khan Academy. It costs $0 for wealthy families. It costs $0 for poor families. It costs $0 for everyone in between.

What makes KA the best for SAT prep? It is free for everyone, assuming you have a phone/computer (which most kids do, either personally or through school)

I think you misunderstood what I wrote:)

The real joke is that we as a society still give weight to institutions like Harvard. We as a whole are much more educated now and the idea that legacy institutions should serve as gatekeepers of education or validation thereof based on reputation alone seems outdated. These schools should be judged by the rigor and quality of their curriculum rather than the reputations of their past. And I say this as someone who graduated from one of these top schools.

Funny, I constantly think how much more educated the educated people were in the past than today. The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s. I would argue that the vast majority of graduating college students are almost entirely unable to write a half decent essay. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that more people get to go to college, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking the average person is so highly educated!

I’m not sure why this is getting downvoted. Every time I read through a scientific journal from the 60’s or 70’s I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that the qualitative and quantitative reasoning is clearer and more sophisticated than what I see in many contemporary publications. The OP is perhaps justified that we should fixate less in the US news rankings, but the sense of decay seems justified. Imposter syndrome is frequently brought up to reassure people but in a lot of cases I see that people are actually frauds and we mask this over with endless positive affirmations. It is genuinely upsetting to see mediocre researchers get tenure when there is such a glut of talent that is simply passed over.

Probably because they weren't blasting out a paper every 2 weeks and could invest much more time on frankly more fertile ground.

That would make sense. There are probably a lot of reasons for this trend. The OP's point about fixating on US News ranking seems related to your suggestion. Whatever the cause may be it seems clear to me that a lot of our best scientific minds are increasingly excluded and marginalized by the modern academy.

> The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s.

Sounds like you're just making this up. Have any studies on this or something not anecdotal?

IQ talk is funny like that. It’s intended to give a science-y sounding veneer to whatever argument is being made but because actual studies are a lot of work, people just throw around numbers with nothing more than “common sense.”

Given that it’s all “common sense” people ought to skip the veneer and just say “more intelligent”, “less intelligent”, “much more intelligent”, and so on. That’s more honest rhetoric.

IQ is a real thing, finding a linear negative relationship between lead levels in children and IQ was the smoking gun to prove that lead was harmful.

I don’t claim it isn’t real. What I claim is that people like to throw around random made up facts involving IQ to make their arguments seem science-y and that they ought not to.

I'll go on the record to say that IQ is as real as any other social construct like money, God, or nationality. Depending on your predilection that can range from worthless to "party of the fabric of reality itself."

IQ isn't a social construct. It is a actual quantitative measure of how well the brain can process information. This is why lead blood concentration causes a predictable decrease in IQ.

You can measure how much money you have in your bank account and money is a social construct. Spending money leads to having measurably less money. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

You might be confusing "social construct" with fake. That's not at all what I'm saying.

IQ isn't a social construct because intelligence is not a social construct. A social construct is something that is created by everyone agreeing that it is real, like money. Human intelligence is a function of how the human brain works and is NOT a social construct.

It's funny arguing with someone who has reified the concept so thoroughly that dereification is unthinkable.

First off I'm setting aside the argument that intelligence is constructed or not. Ssecondly, social ontologists would say that you're arguing from grounding.

You're arguing that because one thing is grounded in the other and the latter is real that the former is real as well. It also sounds like this is taken as axiomatic, to which I simply say, prove that's how grounding works.

Are you willing to argue that height and weight are "social constructs" because IQ is as much a social construct as they are.

Everything is a social construct. It is just a vapid meaningless statement sociologists use to legitimize their expertise and colonize other fields of inquiry that were traditionally the domains of philosophers and scientists. The whole thing is just repackaged Marxist analysis of everything as a social relation.

Things that only work if everyone thinks they are real ARE social constructs. Money is the best example of these. But some pretentious people just LOVE to feel smart by saying everything is a social construct like it is some profound insight that we would all be in awe of.

You didn't comment on the rest of the statement:

"sociologists use to legitimize their expertise and colonize other fields of inquiry that were traditionally the domains of philosophers and scientists. The whole thing is just repackaged Marxist analysis of everything as a social relation."

Let me guess, sociology isn't a real science?

It’s a very heterogenous academic field. Some parts of it are scientific; some parts are pseudo-scientific; some parts are simply non-scientific, which, of course, doesn’t mean that those parts are less worthy or worse than scientific parts.

Right, and even withing social ontology/constructivism there are multitudes. Dismissing the entire subfield as vapid comes across as intellectually immature. If you have specific critiques feel free to share them but, "constructivism bad because Marxism bad," is about as thought-limiting cliché as one can get.

> Right, and even withing social ontology/constructivism there are multitudes.

There are multitudes; and that’s exactly why such statements are vapid and contain no information. You failed to clarify what you meant and only managed to make a vague reference to Berger.

There are thousand contradictory ways to interpret what “a social construct” means (see The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking), but the most important thing about that statement is that it allows a sociologist to say “it’s something I am an authority on”.

> Dismissing the entire subfield as vapid comes across as intellectually immature.

Would dismissing astrology be intellectually immature? I don’t think so.

> "constructivism bad because Marxism bad," is about as thought-limiting cliché as one can get

Indeed. Good that it is not what I’ve said.

It sounds like you've read a critique of social construction without actually reading much about social construction itself.

Social construction is an lens of interpretation in the toolkit of critical thinking. I like to frame it as an epistemological question that simply asks, "How do you know that?" It's extremely powerful when used against topics where people make claims that are "obvious", "reality", "truth", or even "science".

Science itself is an epistomological framework and subject to interpretation from other (meta-)epistomological frameworks eg: scientific examination of social construction is just as valid a pursuit as the social construction of science. In fact that latter, the social construction of science, is the umbrella from which we can examine the concept of IQ. We can talk about it in terms of constitutiveness, grounding, expert-novice problems, &c.

>There are thousand contradictory ways to interpret what “a social construct” means (see The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking), but the most important thing about that statement is that it allows a sociologist to say “it’s something I am an authority on”.

You're describing science. Science "allows" people to say "it's something I am an authority on." This is because it's an epistomological framework independent of the validity of the subject. That's what epistomological frameworks do.

> Would dismissing astrology be intellectually immature? I don’t think so.

We can absolutely talk about the social construction of astrology independent of the truth claims of astrology. I'm sure you can agree with me that there is a profound difference between the two.

> It's extremely powerful when used against topics where people make claims that are "obvious", "reality", "truth", or even "science".

It is an extremely powerful rhetorical device, yes. You can equivocate IQ with “the social construct of IQ” and make seemingly profound statements.

> In fact that latter, the social construction of science, is the umbrella from which we can examine the concept of IQ. We can talk about it in terms of constitutiveness, grounding, expert-novice problems, &c.

Scientists that study IQ can study how useful it is as a metric, whether it has predictive power, whether it is biased, how it relates to common notions of intelligence, how it correlates to other traits, whether it should be used for welfare means testing, etc. The framework of social constructivism cannot help much with that: the flow of knowledge mostly runs in the opposite direction.

> You're describing science.

No, I am describing why sociologists like to use that concept.

> Science "allows" people to say "it's something I am an authority on."

Lots of things allow people to claim authority on something. That’s not what makes science science.

> This is because it's an epistomological framework independent of the validity of the subject. That's what epistomological frameworks do.

> We can absolutely talk about the social construction of astrology independent of the truth claims of astrology. I'm sure you can agree with me that there is a profound difference between the two.

I totally agree. That’s why “IQ is a social construct” is a vapid meaningless statement. You can put anything instead of IQ and it will make as much sense.

You seem to be confused about the difference between labeling something as a social construct and analyzing it as a social construct. Can I ask how you were introduced to the concept?

> You seem to be confused about the difference between labeling something as a social construct and analyzing it as a social construct.

I am not sure what that cryptic insinuation is supposed to accuse me of.

> Can I ask how you were introduced to the concept?

I don't remember? It was probably 10 years ago or more.

Does that assertion suppose to convey any information? It seems you can put any random nouns into your comparison and the meaning won’t change.

> as any other social construct like cheese, boat races or reading

> as any other social construct like HackerNews, children or milk

> as any other social construct like cars, transgenderism or pencils

> as any other social construct like social, construct or like

> Does that assertion suppose to convey any information?

Yes, I'm assuming you're familiar with the topic.

I am not familiar enough to understand what information you are trying to convey using that term. Can you confirm that IQ is a social construct in exactly the same way all other things I listed are social constructs?

I'm using it in the same way as Berger and Luckmann.

Then it seems extremely disingenuous that you only mention money, God and nationality as if you have an axe to grind. Why not say that it is a social construct like the Global Warming, the Holocaust and gender dysphoria?

I chose them because I know my audience.

HN members on average hold views on these topics that are more apt to view as socially constructed than other topics. By focusing on these topics, we can explore why they might be socially constructed and why those reasons are necessary and sufficient. Once establishing that, we can examine IQ to see if they apply as well.

Don't mistake me bringing them up as an endorsement or critique of them in and of themselves. Besides, bringing up global warning, the holocaust, and gender dysphoria will inevitably attract follow-ons who want to debate the validity of those topics.

I'm not here to do that. What I want to establish is what the salient aspects you think constitute a social construct by using these topics as an example. If you want to switch to a different set, by all means, go ahead and choose them instead. I personally think it will be a less productive discussion, but I'm willing to play along.

> I chose them because I know my audience.

I don't know what you mean by that, but to me it gives an impression of run-off-the-mill bashing of "fake" and "bad" things like gender, race, religion, capitalism, nationality that we should re-think and re-make where "social construct" is used as an ambiguous slur by someone who learned about it on Reddit or BuzzFeed. I guess I wasn't the intended audience of that comparison.

> What I want to establish is what the salient aspects you think constitute a social construct by using these topics as an example.

I usually interpret "a social construct" in a way that ranges from being a synonym for "a social contract" to a synonym for something like Kantian appearance (insofar as conception of any object in mind is partly influenced by social institutions) depending on context. But many people seem to make it extremely hard to understand what they mean exactly. So providing examples helps understand what is being asserted. If someone starts talking that X is a social construct just like all that other bad stuff, asking them whether good stuff is a social construct helps ensure that they aren't engaged in agenda-posting or, at least, have far less wiggle room for pushing their rhetoric.

> finding a linear negative relationship between lead levels in children and IQ was the smoking gun to prove that lead was harmful.

Lead toxicity was identified more than 2000 years before the first IQ test, and was rather extensively studied during the Renaissance. The combination of blood lead and IQ tests was important in quantifying the existence and impacts of particular kinds and levels of environmental exposure that had been assumed to be forms of levels that would not be hazardous, but it was not important to identifying lead as a toxin.

I guess I should have said "proving leaded gasoline and paint" was harmful.

If you live in a society where most people go to university, and average IQ is 100 (by definition it was when it was normed) then you're going to get people with <100 IQs going to university, and some of them will graduate.

We're not in such a society though. Ignoring master's, bachelor's, and decent grades to just focus on a lower bar of "people with associate's degrees regardless of grades" we're still shy of 50%, even if we restrict to younger age groups like 25-30 years old.

Here is a chart I found in a minute of searching: https://imgur.com/a/MenAVtj

That image lacks an obvious source or any explanation for methods of how the data was gathered and I can find no record of a study or context that corresponds to this image.

What I can find is a wikimedia entry with the image but no attribution except the "US Census" and no actual link to any publication put out by the Census Bureau. The archive link goes to a page that does not actually contain this graphic, or the data necessary to generate it, making it a bit suspect to begin with.

The census also don't systematically collect IQ scores or themselves administer IQ tests, making the details, data, and methodology of any study they produce paramount to interpreting this barebones graph. The title of the graph itself is borderline ridiculous, awkwardly stated at best and downright deceptive:

IQ tests are not a requirement for graduating college, and taking them at all is relatively uncommon these days.

As it stands, this image is worthless without context, and that context is oddly elusive except for an anonymous wikimedia post that did not cite the source with any specificity required to authenticate it.

This image is even more worthless than it seems. The post on Wikimedia is an original work. Its description states: "As the percentage of graduates increases the minimum IQ to include at least that percentage of graduates inherently decreases. Since 2000 the intelligence required to be a college graduate has been less than the intelligence required to graduate from high school in 1940, based on a standard distribution."

It seems the author took the the percentage of the population that graduated high school/college each year and then found the corresponding percentile on an IQ bell curve and used those as the y-values. This methodology only makes sense if you assume that high school/college graduates are exactly the highest IQ population and that everyone who does not graduate isn't intelligent enough to do so. This chart also almost certainly doesn't normalize IQ over time, even though IQ is constantly redefined so that 100 is average while raw intelligence scores have increased over time [1].

What this chart actually shows is the highest possible IQ of the graduate with the lowest IQ in a given year, a statistic that seems to have dubious value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

You’re right it is worse. It looks like they assumed college-going students would approximate the standard distribution of scores for the population as a whole, which… no. An awful assumption for an activity where academic ability is a primary gatekeeper at the same time that they’re attempting to apply a metric of IQ essentially as a proxy for academic ability/knowledge/whatever. (“Whatever” because the entire concept of intelligence is filled with varying definitions)

Most of the Ivies were much more academically rigorous in the past. There were no ideological, unrigorous majors like Sociology or Gender Studies. Graduates were expected to read both Greek and Latin.

In the 19th century you could get a degree in Divinity, which is clearly ideological and unrigorous.

Those divinity students at a good school in the 1800s were incredibly smart and erudite. Even if you think theology is wrong or silly, it doesn’t mean the people were silly.

Whether it is wrong and silly is irrelevant; my claim is that it is "ideological and unrigorous".

I'm sure lots of them were smart and erudite.

Weirdly, I don’t think society and the role of gender in it are worthless topics of study, and I don’t think intellectual rigor should be measured primarily by knowledge of the languages that form the roots of the non-Germanic portion of English.

While I'm equally skeptical of certain modern majors, I'm not convinced that just because the "educated Western man" (and, yes, we're mostly talking men) of the 19th century were expected to be well-versed in certain subjects doesn't mean there aren't better options for many today.

Almost all of those men went on to marry women who were also very well-educated on the classics. Education was about social class much more than gender.

The fact that we only hear about "great educated men" in the history books has more to do with a bias in society than with who actually got educated.

From what I see, that was mostly a Victorian era thing. Not sure about earlier--though there were certainly tutors for the upper class. Certainly, in general, women weren't learning classical languages in universities until female colleges became fairly common in the US and Britain.

Before the Victorian Era, nothing about womens' lives was well documented, so you can't exactly infer an absence of education from the absence of evidence.

What we know is that the very wealthy often had private tutors for their daughters, and that some women also learned a lot from their parents. Records exist that describe the tutelage of aristocratic and royal women, and it's not hard to extrapolate that those professional tutors probably needed other clients (from the less-well-off aristocracy and merchants) to both "climb the ladder" and fill the gaps between aristocrats' daughters.

An interesting tidbit in this regard is that we actually do know that the women in the (middle class) Bach family were as musically-educated as the men, since they ended up as leading sopranos in opera houses. Some people theorize that the Bach women were the ones teaching their sons music, not the men.

Universities definitely aren't the only places to get educated, and they were a men's club for a shockingly long time. Women were getting higher education in more private settings.

> Before the Victorian Era, nothing about womens' lives was well documented

There are plenty of female diarists. Court cases often delved into women’s lives. Women belonged to institutions like convents that kept records.

The real gaps in documentation aren’t based on gender but class. Not entirely clear what medieval peasants did with their time.

But even then, inquisitions kept meticulous records and regularly investigated small towns. Women were questioned as often as men.

Modern historians (pre-1970s) may have been less interested in women’s lives, but they weren’t necessarily less documented.

Edit: another big gap in records is from the wars of the 20th century. WWII and the wars of the 1990s destroyed “the record” in large parts of eastern europe.

Musical education absolutely, which in the days before recorded music was a relatively widespread and practical undertaking. I assume that private tutoring in classical subjects for upper class women was, if not the norm, probably not rare. And we do know of some examples like Ada Lovelace.

>they were a men's club for a shockingly long time

But, yeah. A lot of elite universities had a rather small percentage of women well into the latter half of the 20th century. Those that have larger numbers was often because there were sister female schools like Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. Dartmouth College didn't start admitting women until the 1970s.

I forgot to add this, and it still seems relevant: before the industrial revolution (the Victorian era), education in the West was pretty rare in general for members of both genders, and very much the privilege of the upper classes.

Or perhaps, since IQ is relative to general population, the average person is a lot smarter due to better nutrition, less lead exposure, and access to information?

>The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s.

IQ is in practice affected by education (to a small extent and mostly in early childhood), but the whole point of it as a concept was to avoid measuring education. So I don't think it follows that higher IQ = more educated.

That's not what he's saying, he's saying collage is too hard to graduate and get good grades with an IQ less that a bit over 100 now, and that number was more like 115 in the past.

Education does not equal intelligence though. I know educated people who are not half as intelligent as my uncle, who really is not that educated.

Plenty of dumb people graduated collage in the 1950’s. The difference is we still value most of their skills while giving them a free pass for all the modern skills they don’t have. Take all that time you spent learning computers and apply it to other stuff and you would be more capable of that stuff.

So yes people on average where better at say mental math back then, but plenty of people still sucked at math etc.

Of course, people did study engineering in 50s even though it mostly wasn't related to computers. (For that matter, I have an engineering degree from the late 70s and I barely touched--or mostly had access to--computers.)

Definitely, and many programs were highly selective, extremely rigorous, and had very high dropout rates. Some colleges just had vastly less demanding degrees and a reputation for wild parties, excessive drinking, etc.

I am mostly referring to the idea people have become less capable because fewer people know how to say repair their cars. Ignoring the fact cars just don’t break down as much and are also vastly more complicated today. So, basic car repair is both more difficult and less necessary.

Car repair is just pretty far down the list of things it's important for most people to be able to do. I have a general notion of how cars work but there's relatively little I could do on my own. (And, of course, it's increasingly difficult for even indie garages to do a lot of things.)

I do wonder if selective schools have over-rotated in the theoretical direction though that's a debate with a very long history. I'm reading a bio of "Doc" Draper, for whom Draper Labs--which designed the Apollo Guidance Computer--is named. And I was just commenting to a friend literally last night that I bet a lot of the very hands-on engineers who tinkered as much as they did theory like Draper and Doc Edgerton (inventor the strobe) and others would probably never have gotten faculty appointments as prestigious universities today.

Personally, the courses where I did hands-on work are some of the ones I remember best.

> The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s

Where's your data to back this up?

Harvard is private social club, a glorified country club posing as a school. The entire purpose of the institution is to perpetuate the disparity of wealth and power in society. The selectivity and exclusiveness is essential, the raison d'être of Harvard. This is the only thing we need to understand about it.

More importantly while there’s nothing wrong with operating a private social club, doing it with public tax dollars and claiming it’s anything but a private social club is ridiculous.

And one that rich people can just buy there children access to. Jared Kushner's dad donated $2 million to get his son into Harvard.

This made the scandal where celebrities were photoshopping photos of their kids doing prep school sports a little awkward. The rarely reported detail was that they were paying $200k bribes because they weren't actually rich enough to make $2M bribes directly to the schools.

The price has gone up a lot since then. I hear it's now over $10 million for a seat, possibly as high as $50 million.

And they like to keep the club exclusive...

>In the 16 years since, although the number of applicants to the College has more than doubled, the size of Harvard’s undergraduate population has remained relatively constant. This year, the College admitted 2,037 students to the Class of 2020; in comparison, 2,035 students were admitted to the Class of 2004.

IMO when your non taxable endowment gets large but your undergrad population stays the same maybe part of the endowment should become taxable.

You realize they're in the middle of Cambridge, MA, right? It's not like there's a bunch of empty land around the campus to just make the school bigger.

Acquiring non-Harvard land in Allston met with some backlash owing to how they went about it (sneakily, to avoid getting put over a barrel on price).

Building up rather than out would require knocking down buildings that range from historic to merely very old.

Suggesting that Harvard should just take more students as the number of applicants grows sort of ignores the constraints they operate under.

Non-affiliated former Boston resident.

Don't many universities have branches elsewhere? Would students choose not to go to Harvard if the campus was in say New Jersey? Would the quality of education be inferior outside of Cambridge?

I've heard some schools even have online offerings, crazy.

They could very easily set up a new campus a few miles away.

Also I doubt there are any truly "historic" buildings at Harvard -- universities that really have historic buildings predate the USA by multiple centuries.

Like Harvard? Which was founded in 1636. It's no Oxford, but the buildings are historic in the context of the USA, which is the context that matters for purposes of this discussion.

And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare. Traffic sucks, and public transportation is, on a good day, adequate[0].

Getting between the new science center in Allston and Harvard Square is about a 20 minute walk (hustling). Driving might shave 10 minutes off of that. Or it could add that much and more, depending on the time of day.

Harvard's med school is in Longwood, which presumably only works because the med students live off campus anyway and don't have to get to the main campus on a regular basis.

[0] See https://universalhub.com for examples. You're unlikely to have to look back more than a week.

> And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare.

Fine, have a separate standalone campus, maybe on the west cvoast. Or just shift everything to the new campus. They could easily do this if they wanted to. They don't want to.

"public transportation is, on a good day, adequate[0]."

In a world where NIMBYs weren't the most important people on the scene, building a tram (streetcar) line between those two campuses would be a working solution. High capacity, intervals can be adjusted to the needs of the school, no traffic jams on the track.

And Harvard sits on an enormous warchest, it could cover the costs handily.

But pushing such a construction project in contemporary atmosphere would take longer than landing on the Moon.

Also IMO stop taking Pell Grants, Federal aid, and pay taxes on their endowments and these schools can admit whoever they please.

Those schools are also where most of cutting edge research happens. And that’s why the folks who go there have such strong networks and an in-crowd mentality.

I am trying my hand at networking and I find that I get ghosted like 80% of the time when people I talk to from these backgrounds find out I’m not as qualified on paper.

To discriminate, whether by race or by alma mater, is innate; even if it is illegal it will still happen. Meritocracy is hard, and wounded when we characterize a flaw in a meritocracy as if that were judgment day.

Should we all abandon Harvard now? Nah, this battle is everywhere.

> The real joke is that we as a society still give weight to institutions like Harvard.

Indeed. I don't understand the fascination with Harvard when you can go to MIT.

I generally agree :-) Though many of the same dynamics apply to MIT even if some of the specifics differ. MIT isn't admitting students purely on the basis of test scores.

I knew a long ago admissions director at MIT. At least at the time, they basically had an x-y chart with quantitative on one axis and qualitative on the other. There was a quantitative lower-bound cutoff but, beyond that, the two factors could balance each other out. (e.g. decent but not not fantastic SATs could be balanced out by really eye-catching qualitative factors and vice versa.)

At least MIT says that if you can't do well on the SAT, you're not going to pass your calc final.

Keep this comment top of mind when you next are involved in hiring.

It remains a Schelling Point. That's what keeps many institutions going.

In game theory, a focal point (or Schelling point) is a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication.

i'd rather they get judged by the students they output rather than using only an input, ie curriculum

this better allows for competition to flourish imo

I thought the theory was people are dumber than ever thanks to smartphones, social media, decreased attention spans, etc. I would take a bet that the average person is not even close to as smart as the average Harvard grad.

Something like 35% of the US has graduated university[1]. I suppose the average university graduate is smarter than the average person regardless of the school they attended.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

It's not going away, because school choice continues to be a valuable signal of how capable someone is, and graduates of "top" schools continue to have disproportionately higher impacts on society.

I would posit you might be conflating "capability" and "impact" in a manner that elides the many distinctions.

You're right, I definitely could have worded this one better in hindsight. I guess the downvotes are my lesson.

At some point it just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The smartest people in the world want the Harvard brand. They graduate and do great things. Their success gets attributed back to Harvard. So how does one measure what specifically the university is bringing to the table?

You look at who got accepted to Harvard but didn’t go.

> graduates of "top" schools continue to have disproportionately higher impacts on society.

you offer no data to differentiate between this being caused by their abilities, or their greater access to the networks that place people in high impact positions.

"and graduates of "top" schools continue to have disproportionately higher impacts on society."

Source? There are many individuals who went to state schools or didn't go to college at all that have turned into billionaires, Nobel prize winners, etc.

Not to mention there's no evidence that the people who went to an elite school would have less of an impact if elite schools didn't exist.

A higher number of those billionaires, Nobel prize winners, and political leaders in the US went to elite schools like Harvard and Yale.

They undoubtedly have higher impacts on society, not because they are the smartest, but because having an elite school degree unlocks opportunities that are not available to average person…for all our talks about meritocracy, humans still pay more attention to signaling, branding, and marketing…and the elite schools know how to milk that for money and power.

"A higher number of those billionaires, Nobel prize winners, and political leaders in the US went to elite schools like Harvard and Yale."

Again, any numbers on that?

"not because they are the smartest, but because having an elite school degree unlocks opportunities"

Or did they go to an elite school because they already came from money, which is the true source of those opportunities.

> any numbers on that?

Current US Supreme Court:

  Alito - Yale 
  Coney Barrett - Notre Dame
  Brown Jackson - Harvard
  Gorsuch - Harvard
  Kavanaugh - Yale
  Kagan - Harvard
  Roberts - Harvard
  Sotomayor - Yale
  Thomas - Yale

Noticing anything?

That's 9 people in one profession. A profession that specifically has restrictions on who can be a lawyer and judge. I can name people who didn't graduate from college, or graduated from non-ivy schools too. Considering technology is extremely influential in shaping out lives, you'll probably find it interesting how many of these people never even graduated from college.

https://www.developgoodhabits.com/successful-people-college/

I'm looking for actual stats.

It's common sense, it's just a numbers game. Harvard has like 8000 undergrads or whatever, while your typical state school has ~60000. All I'm saying is that if you take a random student from both these populations, the Harvard student is statistically more likely to be some uber-successful wunderkind. In no way am I trying to say that people from non-elite schools are inherently less capable.

Harvard was created to educate the elite not to create it. This is the fundamental issue here.

These institutions see their purpose as preserving western civilisation and hopefully shaping its future direction. Part of this joke was about turning Harvard into a trade school for asian doctors. From their point of view this would be the same as becoming a factory churning out plumbers or electricians.

The "secret sauce" of the admissions process is simply "If this candidate doesn't attend Harvard are they highly likely to become a member of the elite anyway?". This opens up things about our society we don't want to face. George Bush is related to the late Queen of England. Many of the elite are the same families who have ruled over us for the last thousand years.

Even at the local level your chance at becoming an important person in your city is closely related to who your parents are.

By accounting for the structure of society and distribution of power at the time of application the admissions process becomes at best conservative and at worst racist.

On November 30, 2012, amid a friendly back-and-forth about lunch plans, Hibino e-mailed Fitzsimmons an attachment that he described as “really hilarious if I do say so myself!” Hibino explained, “I did it for the amusement of our team, and of course, you guys”—presumably Harvard admissions officers—“are the only others who can appreciate the humor.” The joke memo had been written on Harvard admissions-office stationery, during the earlier investigation. It was purportedly from an associate director of admissions and parodied the admissions officer downplaying an Asian American applicant’s achievements. The memo denigrated “José,” who was “the sole support of his family of 14 since his father, a Filipino farm worker, got run over by a tractor,” saying, “It can’t be that difficult on his part-time job as a senior cancer researcher.” It continued, “While he was California’s Class AAA Player of the Year,” with an offer from the Rams, “we just don’t need a 132 pound defensive lineman,” apparently referring to a slight Asian male physique. “I have to discount the Nobel Peace Prize he received. . . . After all, they gave one to Martin Luther King, too. No doubt just another example of giving preference to minorities.” The memo dismissed the fictional applicant as “just another AA CJer.” That was Harvard admissions shorthand for an Asian American applicant who intends to study biology and become a doctor, according to the trial transcript.

It's pretty disgusting what you can get away with as long as you follow the right politics.

> It's pretty disgusting what you can get away with as long as you follow the right politics.

Do you mean the joke? I read it as criticism of the policy to do racial discrimination.

You're forgetting who the audience is. The audience is Harvard admissions staff. That changes the nature of the joke quite a bit in my opinion. Since it is an inside joke for only Harvard's people and their ideologically-aligned "regulators," it reads to me as more of an acknowledgement and acceptance of the practice of anit-asian discrimination, and at most a suggestion that they tone it down a bit.

If this were a parody written for the daily show (for example) or something else intended for a wide audience, it would absolutely have been criticism of Harvard, but the audience really does change the joke.

Personally, I think this is one of the more racist things that I have seen recently, and large swathes of both Harvard's admissions staff and the folks "investigating" them need to resign.

Hmm ... you might be correct. It is down to intent really.

I think the parent comment meant that there doesn't seem to be any cost to making jokes at the expense of Asians.

A similar parody letter based on stereotypes about black people will pretty much end their career, no matter the intent.

Caveat: no archive link and I'm not about to start paying the new Yorker to tell me how the world works, so might be missing context.

Hibino, I'm gonna guess, is Japanese.

The jokes don't seem like their punching down at Jose (the fictional Filipino). They seem to be saying; "no matter how hard Jose seems to work, nobody is ever impressed because they assume he's either getting handouts or his job is easy".

My take, like the parent comment, is that this is a joke on the admissions office, and the systemic racism in such institutions - not at the expense of Asians (esp. since the one sending the joke was Asian to begin with).

If the Dean of Admissions and a government official with detailed knowledge of Harvard’s admissions process both privately believe that Harvard illegally discriminates on the basis of race, that seems extremely probative in a trial on that exact issue.

Oh, for sure. I will be the last person on earth to come to the defense of an institution like this - I think that frequently, it's our social structures that are pathological before it's specific individuals.

People, on balance, are not all so racist, bigoted, short-sighted, greedy, selfish, etc. (with glaring outliers, ofc). Institutions are more often than not some, if not all, of these things. It's almost as if we encode the worst of ourselves in these social contracts and give them everlasting life.

As a sibling comment mentioned, it's also entirely possible for Hibino to be discriminatory himself. It just feels a little like there's not quite enough information to hang him specifically.

This isn't the defense you think it is.

Asians can be racist & discriminatory towards other Asians.

Japanese & Filipinos having something of a history no less..

The joke is not at the expense of Asians, it is satirizing how Asians can be discriminated against in admissions

Still would have been a risky move. There are examples in the past of jokes not well understood ...

The email itself said "you're the only person who would understand this sort of humor" so it's important to look at this in context. The recipient of the email was asian himself.

Whether it can end careers? Sure people freely ignore context and socially burn people at the stake for much less. But IRL it's important to ask whether they were actually being racist with their satire. Which I personally think is a pretty thin argument.

The author was Japanese and the subject was Filipino. There's a lot of (racial? cultural?) animus there - it's a little like a yankee making fun of a white southerner. Among Asian people, Filipino and Japanese are often considered different races.

> The recipient of the email was asian himself.

The recipient was https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/22/fitzsimmons-pro...

The Asian in the joke was practically superhuman, nothing was made at the "expense" of Asians. The joke was explicitly mocking Harvard's obvious discrimination against Asian applicants.

If it was intended as criticism, then one would expect the joke's author, who was the regulator in charge of ensuring no racial discrimination, would have offered the much more direct criticism of taking regulatory action.

The joke's author did no such thing. And was careful to make sure it never got to anyone who might be inclined to criticize Harvard's admissions practice.

Furthermore the fact that Harvard admissions HAD slang like "Just another AA CJer" is pretty strong evidence of discrimination.

The author of the joke memo is himself Asian American, which is a relevant detail.

Maybe, maybe not. Could also be read as the very real racism / discrimination of East Asians towards Southeast Asians. Especially a white collar educated East Asian vs a more recently immigrated working class Southeast Asian family.

Analogy would be a white guy named Bob Smith working a fancy office job, living in Manhattan making jokes about slack jawwed Cletus the farmer from Alabama.

I also thought it was intended as a sort of parody / criticism.

The characterization of this joke as “anti-Asian” seems very incorrect to me. It’s clearly satirizing the stereotype that Asian American typically are more accomplished and discriminated against in admissions because of it. It’s absolutely relevant to the case, but is definitely not anti-Asian.

EDIT: changed “fact” to “stereotype”. Guess I’ll let the court decide the facts…

Yeah, it's anti-Harvard admissions, which is the entire point of the case, and the judge wouldn't allow it into evidence?

And it's pretty hilarious how far over your head a joke can fly when you follow the wrong politics.

The real punchline is that the Harvard dean initially believed the memo was genuine, that an associate director of admissions had written it as a parody of Harvard’s own practices.

My reading was that he initially thought the memo was a joke that was written by a real admissions officer (whose name was used on the document). The memo was so over-the-top (Nobel Prize!) that it would have been obvious that no such student had ever applied.

Yes, but SFFA is almost definitely going to eventually breach this wall sooner or later, and I can bear these awfully obvious judicial biases on the margins as we advance our way toward stamping out centuries old pseudoscientific human taxonomy from our society one slow step at a time.

> She found that “the majority of the disparity” in the personal ratings was “more likely caused by race-affected inputs to the admissions process” (such as high-school recommendation letters) or “underlying differences in the attributes” of Asian American and white applicants (meaning that the scores accurately reflected the groups’ qualities). Her bottom line was that Asian Americans’ low personal ratings were “not the result of intentional discrimination” by Harvard.

I suspect this is true, but also shows why subjective evaluation is bad. I have no doubt that, on average, white applicants (socialized into American culture) are better able to persuade some college administrator that they care about something other than getting a job at McKinsey or Goldman than an Asian applicant (who is likely socialized into Asian culture even if born here).

I’m reminded of Barbara Walter’s awful speech at my brother’s graduation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7llYZ2XqLX4. In my experience this is both a common way white Americans think and also bizarre to most Asians. We shouldn’t force Asian kids to go along with this silliness just to get into school.

I’m not going to defend that commencement speech but I want to push back on your thesis.

Why should Harvard be reduced to a job training program for McKinsey or Goldman? Why is it bizarre and silly for people to pursue happiness over money?

From a societal standpoint, I believe we owe much to people who did just that. Scientists and mathematicians, yes, but also writers and actors and poets and musicians. Where would we be, as a society, if everyone focused 100% on the hustle, the grind, the drive to be a founder or a lawyer or a quant?

We’d be a morally and culturally bankrupt desolation. And our schools would be 100% complicit.

While I agree that culture and education are not just means to the end of getting a lucrative job, I think that GP’s point is that it is easier for a white American, _even if they only care about money_, to appear as if they cared about other values.

For many people grown and socialized in some Asian cultures (including Japanese, Korean and Chinese), a good job in a prestigious company is considered a worthwhile objective, not something that needs to be disguised.

I think that's more a trait of emigrant subcultures than it is a trait of those cultures as a whole. Parents who take big personal, financial, and social risks to move to another country tend to want to protect their investment. When it comes to their children's choice of career, they can get very offended if the child chooses to pursue theatre or fine arts instead of medicine or law.

If, on the other hand, you travel to Japan, Korea, or China (or indeed India, Thailand, Vietnam, or any other country in Asia where people emigrate to come to the US) and actually visit people living in the countryside, in small towns and farming villages, you'll see a radically different picture. People practicing their culture and living a traditional way of life.

The difficulty of immigration and setting down roots in a new place, far from the support of extended family social networks, serves as a natural (and artificial, due to various immigration laws) barrier which tends to select for families where the parents have this sort of drive.

I have met manu Japanese, and a few Chinese, working for Japanese (resp. Chinese) financial companies. All of them were proud of the position they reached, even those that were not too happy about the working conditions (very long hours, slow career progression)

For Korea I only have indirect information.

I dated a Chinese international student for 2 years. Her parents put a ton of pressure on her, academically. They would not even allow her to study chemistry (her passion in high school), so she ended up studying math. They are practically forcing her to go to grad school as well. She is not happy with this situation, to say the least.

Now she wants to study cognitive science. They are not happy about it but they can't do anything because they're in China and she's in North America. I've encouraged her to study what she wants.

I think there are countless other Asian students in the same boat. I think part of the reason Harvard is doing what they're doing is to push back on it. Harvard wants independent thinkers who are trying to make a difference in the world, not ladder-climbers (reluctant or otherwise) being pushed by overzealous parents.

Given the outlook for postgraduate chemistry careers I’ve got to take her parents’ side on this one

why, is not chemistry more utility than mathematics in industry?

Maybe in PRC, not USA

> I think there are countless other Asian students in the same boat. I think part of the reason Harvard is doing what they're doing is to push back on it. Harvard wants independent thinkers who are trying to make a difference in the world

Harvard didn’t get to be Harvard by churning out “independent thinkers.” It’s just something WASPs (the ones with real money and breeding) know to say while they try to go work at Morgan Stanley like their dad wants.

For one, kids of poor families can’t really afford to go to university to peruse happiness over money. They don’t want to become poets and musicians because they have a family to support.

If you’re a poor kid and you get into Harvard you get a full ride. Furthermore, even a degree in poetry and literature from Harvard will be your ticket to the middle class. For Harvard students there’s really no excuse not to study whatever you’re most passionate about.

I don’t know anything about you but this sounds out of touch. When you are coming from a poor family you look to maximum financial earnings, not pursue your passions. Financial security is the top priority and you don’t achieve that with a degree in poetry. You study STEM.

> "underlying differences in the attributes” of Asian Americans

But doesn't this mean that AAs were on average less interesting people, or whatever the personal score is trying to judge?

How can that be true?

It seems so much more likely to me that admissions officers understood that if AAs got similar personal scores to other groups then AAs would be overrepresented, and so the admissions officers (implicitly or explicitly) scored more them more harshly.

How can it be true that AAs are less interesting people on average? Isn't the usual answer of why they are so successful on standardized tests that it comes down to their culture? Why shouldn't their charisma also be cultural?

Point is moot because the alumni scores had no such discrepancy

Instead of just linking to a 24 min video can you share what part was awful?

> When I went to college I went to a very small college called Sarah Lawrence, back in the middle ages. I had a professor who became very well known. His name was Joseph Campbell and he exhorted us all to follow our bliss. Do what you love, follow your bliss and you will truly be successful. It was great advice, except when I graduated from college I hadn't a clue what I really loved. I had no bliss to follow. When I look at all of you today I think many of you do know what your bliss is. Graduate school, or medicine or law or biology, ecology, sociology. How about none of the above? How many of you in this graduating class truly know what your bliss is? Raise your hands. Isn't that interesting. Not that great a number. How many of you do not know what your bliss is? Raise your hands. Don't be afraid. Most of us don't. I didn't find my bliss until I was in my 30s and then by luck. That's another story.

It’s just individualistic dreck.

Basically just “find something you are passionate about so you enjoy your career”. Meh, seems harmless in a commencement speech and not race/culture specific advice.

This is the hierarchy of needs. Western society has been wealthy for a few extra generations over Asian. Paying the bills just isn’t enough for many of us to feel our life was well spent at this point. Possibly it’s decadent and a sign of decay.

> Possibly it’s decadent and a sign of decay.

Yes. As an immigrant from a third world country it’s actually quite scary to me that the current generation of Americans probably couldn’t have built the society they inherited from their ancestors.

Judge Burroughs’s opinion also addressed the striking fact that, when sending recruitment letters to potential applicants in “Sparse Country” (underrepresented states in the Harvard applicant pool), Harvard used an SAT score cutoff of 1310 for white students, 1350 for Asian American females, and 1380 for Asian American males.

Constitutional lawyers-- how is this not discrimination?

Edit: to be clear-- when I wrote "constitutional lawyers," I meant people who have domain experience in constitutional law. And when I wrote "discrimination," I mean discrimination that would be unconstitutional according to both the U.S. Constitution and relevant U.S. legal precedent.

Hopefully this will cause relevant comment to bubble up above the one that begins with "IANAL..."

It is, or at least likely to be recognized as such within the next month or so by SCOTUS.

Chief Justice Roberts, for one, seemed pretty steamed by Harvard's treatment of Asian-ancestry applicants, and he's got 5 justices to his right on this.

Honestly, I would not be shocked if Justice Kagan hopped on with the majority: Quantitative practices like this—and the "social scoring" that would be taken as clear evidence of racism in almost any other context—are hard to defend under the "value of diversity" rationale.

It will be interesting to see if Gorsuch breaks with the conservative side here. He seems like a "good old boy" from the Harvard social club (he is one of 4 SCOTUS judges who went to Harvard law). Roberts is also a Harvard graduate, but he doesn't seem to be the kind of person to break with his principles on this.

I would agree with you on Kagan, but her alma mater is... Harvard Law. The last Harvard SCOTUS judge is Jackson, who has a 0% chance to rule against them here.

I think there is 0 chance any of the six conservative justices let stand practices that, again, are either facially discriminatory or have demonstrated disproportionate impact with no plausible explanation other than discriminatory intent.

The interesting question to me is whether there's a consensus position on acceptable means to "diversity" ends that pulls in Kagan or the other liberals.

Jackson is recused, so the only only other liberal they need is Sonja, and she seemed pretty virulently in favor of Harvard in oral arguments.

> The last Harvard SCOTUS judge is Jackson, who has a 0% chance to rule against them here.

Pardon my ignorance, why?

During oral arguments on other affirmative action cases, she was incredibly defensive of the practice.

IANAL, but I would say it's because these are recruitment letters, not acceptance policies. As in: it alters where you look, not what you're looking for. And that can alter the balance in the representation that you end up with, even if your selection criteria are exactly the same across all groups.

It's the same as hiring policies. Imagine you have an objective test that you can give candidates, and you are willing to accept anyone who gets a 5 on a 5-point scale. The test is completely independent of race. You have two schools to draw candidates from. One is 90% white, the other 90% Black. You have resources to recruit at only one school. You want to increase the representation of Black employees, without lowering your standards.

Which school do you recruit at? The 90% Black one. You end up with employees who are exactly as qualified as if you had recruited at the other school, but a higher percentage of them are Black. If you're white and go to the second school, your chances of getting an offer are no different. If you're white (or Black) and go to the first school, you get no recruiter and unless you find out about the position on your own, you're screwed. If the schools are the same size, then you could say that being white lowered your chances of getting hired, as a direct result of the choice that the recruiter made.

Does the recruiter have a responsibility to make your odds of being admitted independent of your race? What would that mean? If there are 100 schools to choose from, it would mean that the recruiter would have to go to every one of them, and spend an amount of time at each inversely proportional to the school percentage of some race, which doesn't take into account the overall size of each school... it doesn't even work mathematically.

Back to the original example, imagine if Sparse Country states had twice as many good Asian male candidates as Asian female, and twice as many of those as good white candidates. (The percentages of not good candidates could be completely different, even reversed, and it wouldn't change anything.) Nothing stops any of those candidates from applying. But you can adjust your recruiting policies to get roughly the same number of good applications from each group.

This reduces the odds that a given Asian male (sampled evenly from the population) will end up admitted. But it does not affect the odds for an Asian male who chooses to apply.

> Hopefully this will cause relevant comment to bubble up above the one that begins with "IANAL..."

They gave you a perfectly good answer. Asking people to apply is very different from how you treat the applications.

How about you be more specific on what in particular you think is violated? Do you have any response to the counter-questions about how a recruiter even could go after neutral demographics when the colleges they visit don't have neutral demographics?

Put in a little bit of explanation before you start demanding a lawyer spend time on you.

> Constitutional lawyers-- how is this not discrimination

You’re going to have to ask one of those “living Constitution” folks to explain how that’s not discrimination.

The same shifting criteria were applied to Jews. In the early 1900s proficiency in Latin was required because only prep school offered Latin, so it was an implied filter that’s nonetheless “impartial”. Then Jews became very good at Latin, so the ivies phased out Latin as a criteria and began admitting talent from the interior, because Jews did not settle there. So this whole game is applies to Asian Americans now, not at all surprising

I see the appeal of SAT as a standard metric, but rather than SAT why not allow kids to submit AP (or other standardized subject test scores) instead? Studying for the SAT feels like we are wasting hours of kids lives on an ill-defined concept of general aptitude. Whereas for subject tests (like AP or other standardized subject tests) there is a concrete subject that students are demonstrating that they can choose and master (chemistry, English, Spanish, Calculus, etc.)

I think this approach has the benefit of standardization and the benefit of not wasting kids time forcing them to study for a test which people claim won't change their scores much and where the notion of what aptitude even is isn't really clear (the SAT has changed substantially over the years).

I also really doubt the claim that studying for the SAT won't impact a kid's scores much. I can't think of a single other test where this is the case. It sounds like something people tell poor kids so they don't bother studying for it, while rich kids spend hours in test prep. Then we can say "well it wouldn't have mattered if they got the same resources because aptitude is innate". In contrast, no one can claim that if you just waltz into your chemistry test without studying it won't have an impact.

My preference would be to get rid of "aptitude" tests like the SAT, and use standardized subject tests instead.

Why do we collectively put up with this anti-democratic shit?

The entire back and forth between the judge and the reporter was just totally irresponsible and shows the Judge's lack of dedication to the principles of a free and informed society. That alone should be worth disbarment.

I think it's because everyone secretly just wants in on the scam, and thinks that they are cunning enough to get their hand stamped if they do the right set of actions.

Talk to Asian American parents like me about how we feel about this AA nonsense. No matter how you look at it, it penalizes our kids for being hard workers.

At the startup I work at, the unwritten hiring rule is that the college major is important, while the college itself is not. A STEM degree from Chico State is worth a lot more than a history or anthropology degree from Harvard/Brown.

While I agree with you, the type of people looking to get into Harvard aren't just looking for a STEM job at a startup. They are looking to become CEOs, judges, politicians, etc. That sort of thing usually tends to value where you went. Not only for the credibility of the paper but the social networks you gain.

> They are looking to become CEOs, judges, politicians, etc.

Yeah, and their degrees don't matter to get those jobs either. I mean of course it matters, but it's still the same degree they could get elsewhere.

The network of well connected powerful people they meet at Harvard is what enables them to become CEOs, judges, politicians, etc.

I wasn't talking about coding jobs. Even jobs in marketing or program management go to STEM students from "lesser" schools. I don't even look at sociology or language degrees anymore.

Well that seems awfully discriminatory of you. Some of the best programmers I have ever met have sociology and language degrees.

gonna be a surpise when society finds out about the bamboo ceiling. and people aren't rushing to promote asian american ceos

>> No matter how you look at it, it penalizes our kids for being hard workers.

Do you think that as a general group, AA students are being hard workers more than other groups of students?

Looking at GPAs, ECs, and test scores, I strongly think so. I suspect it's because of the family culture, and parents modeling correct behavior at home. It's not about AA vs. other ethnicities. My MBA class had a number of second generation Nigerian Americans, who had a similar culture with high expectations from kids.

One could argue then that a student in another group that had similar or slightly lower GPA, EC, and test scores to those in the AA group achieved their scores by virtue of having a higher raw intelligence or personal drive since they weren't from a culture where parents set high expectations for their children.

In other words: penalize Asian American kids for being born into intact, hard-working families. Subtract 300 points from their SATs and subjectivity give them low personality scores. Aim for equality of outcomes instead of equal opportunities.

> Aim for equality of outcomes instead of equal opportunities.

No, that's not the goal.

For the ones that don't just want a quota, it's about how you measure the baseline of equal opportunity.

Let's imagine, for the sake of simplicity, a situation with only good motivations and where race has no correlation with anything else:

Learning more because someone helped you is a good thing.

Learning more because of intrinsic motivation is even better.

If two candidates have the same score, but one got their on their own, they are the better candidate.

Which implies that sometimes a candidate that has a worse score but has more motivation is a better candidate. Depending on the ratio of how much worse and how much motivation.

Favoring them would not mean the other candidate is penalized for their family environment. It's saying that different ways of reaching a test score matter different amounts. The raw test score isn't your level of qualification.

And trying to find the candidate that will do best is definitely not favoring equality of outcome at the cost of equal opportunity.

Note: None of this is a defense of the specific way Harvard does anything. None of this is a promise that Harvard admissions have good motives.

So when whites were considered genetically superior you chose them and now that you consider Asians to be genetically superior, you chose against them. How very "heads I win, tails you lose"

Yes, I did all that.

But no, that's not it at all. If someone is genetically superior, this method favors them. It "disfavors" having a good environment. And by "disfavors", I mean that a good environment is still favored, but less so than individual attributes.

And again, no promises that such a method is actually representative of what Harvard is doing.

I have always seen Ivy League admission controversies as stemming from the fact that the number of "perfect" (as measured by objective criteria) candidates is so high versus available spots, that there are only two solutions:

* Select candidates randomly from a pool of perfect candidates.

* Select candidates based on additional, subjective criteria.

The first approach seems inherently fairer, but schools went with the second approach. It's hardly surprising that all sorts of biases creep in.

I once read that a candidate was rejected because, having an enormous amount of extracurricular activities in his CV, was deemed "too intense".

> I once read that a candidate was rejected because, having an enormous amount of extracurricular activities in his CV, was deemed "too intense".

While “too intense” is poor wording (and perhaps shorthand), I’m guessing that the activities had the following traits:

1. Limited to unspecified “participation”, the substance of which was not verified or confirmed in other parts of the application. Typically elite schools are looking for leadership roles as well as moving the needle in some way.

2. Looked like resume/application boosting since no one can reasonably participate in a quality manner in this many activities.

In certain communities, especially in the NE corridor, racking up mostly low-engagement ECs is a hobby.

>> the number of "perfect" (as measured by objective criteria) candidates is so high versus available spots

"Elite overproduction"

> What was Judge Burroughs trying to hide? I eventually obtained the joke memo and the surrounding e-mails, and what I read didn’t strike me as having been worth the fight to keep them secret.

Yet you wrote a whole article about it. Sounds like a nothingburger that downplays and pulls attention away from real problems.

A Regional Director of the U.S. Department of Education who is supposed to regulate Harvard is a friend of the dean of admissions at Harvard. And you just gloss over it and focus on the joke...

Agreed, I actually agree with the judge here (even though I disagree with her rulings and behaviour otherwise):

> she added, asserting that asking him about the memo on the stand would be “designed for media consumption and not for any great search for the truth.”

It really is press fodder that will get 10x the attention of their buddy-buddy relationship between regulator and admissions office. The fact they were close friends and having lunch together regularily seems like a bigger story and a serious conflict of interest that gets glossed over to focus repeatedly on the joke memo + the judges reaction. The memo may have some minor relevance to the case for credibility attacks but this case is about much more than an individual DOE regulator's personality (especially considering it was the gov official not the Harvard guy who wrote it).

But I guess the Streisand Effect cancels this out regardless.

> fodder

Since 'fodder' is food for cattle, I think GP's point stands: The New Yorker is supposed to be food for the somewhat highly literate two legged reader.

Yeah, this is a massive nothingburger, seemingly written because the author was pissed at being brushed off by the judge. And whether the judge was right or wrong to try to squash the joke, the comments in this thread show that she was right about people being eager to misinterpret the joke and focus on it, missing any signal for the shiny noise.

I’m the kind of person who generally approaches everyone as “What do I really know about this person?”. And the answer is almost always “not much”.

I don’t understand how these admissions folks work and it kind of makes me suspicious about someone who really wants to do that.

Back in 2021 I was listening to some NPR podcast about college admissions during the Covid pandemic and they had some college admissions people as guests. One of them, after talking about how thoughtful and seriously they take their process of making decisions, said that he just wanted applicants to stop writing essays about how their lives were impacted by the Covid pandemic.

I knew instantly that it was all bullshit, and none of my children have applied to colleges that include essays as part of the application process.

> wanted applicants to stop writing essays about how their lives were impacted by the Covid pandemic. ¶ I knew instantly that it was all bullshit

Or maybe, like anyone else would be, after reading 1000 identical essays about how shitty the pandemic was, he was mentally exhausted.

I can’t help but think of those people who REALLY want to be a forum moderator or on those bizzaro world campus justice systems… and often seem to be the worst people to do the job.

Can anyone suggest what "CJer" is short for in "AA CJer"? It apparently is used to refer to Asian American pre-med type students, but I'm curious was the CJer part is.

There's a comment here from someone trying (probably unsuccessfully) to answer this same question: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2023/03/a-federal-official-wro...

I can't find anything about this term with a web search, and currently suspect it might be a typo.

Seems to stand for “Joint Concentration”, where a concentration is what Harvard calls a major.

https://undergrad.gov.harvard.edu/joint-concentration

But why CJ and not JC?

Matches with all my personal experiences with judges - the truth is what I say it is.

https://archive.is/R6Ad7

Judges should be impartial, nay are required to be impartial, yet we never punish judges who are not. This smells like collusion, at the very least seriously unprofessional. Judges and prosecutors should not have qualified immunity, the temptation to insert personal bias is too great.

So much effort seems to go into arguing what should be public and what should not. While I see the benefits of privacy, and the benefits of openness, I don't see the benefits of everyone spending days arguing.

I propose a different solution:

All content is put in 3 categories. One is fully open info. One will be kept hidden for one year after proceedings finish (basically long enough that nobody can appeal anymore). One will be kept hidden for 80 years.

There is no secret information. If you do something dishonest, you might get away with it for a lifetime, but your children will find out.

Of my colleagues, the who is most successful didn't attend college at all. With the internet providing near free information we don't *need* college.

Sure it's a fun 4 years, sure you might meet someone nice, but it's not needed to live a full life.

In fact, I'd argue before attending college you should have to work a real job for a bit. Understand how money works, then blowing 60k a year to get a degree means a different thing.

With all of this in mind, get rid of race based admissions.

Maybe they would have been even more successful if they went to college?

The fact that someone succeeded without going to college says something good about them but it doesn’t necessarily follow that colleges are bad or that they’ve succeeded because they didn’t go to college.

My point is you don't need to go to college. I consider myself to be successful and this guy is definitely making much more than I am.

If college is worth it for everyone, why is there such a need for student loan forgiveness. If anything the market is self correcting since more and more people are skipping college entirely.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230325180654/https://www.newyo...

The focus on subjective essay over objective tests baffles me. It is guaranteed that the rich kids will have more opportunities to a.) get a more polished essay written by whatever help needed, b) do all kinds of stuff that looks good on an essay but costs either time or money and is much harder for a poor kid to do.

A poor kid can compete on objective tests relatively better by spending a much smaller amount of money. Subjective criteria just seem designed to game.

It seems like what the US universities really want is some quota for the % of students representing some demographic ratio they have in mind. But since that is not constitutional, and might also make bad press, they come up with totally opaque and subjective criteria. I feel really bad for students being rejected for being less "likeable" just so the University can meet it's undisclosed quotas.

If quotas are what you want then come out and say it.

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