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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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:)

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