The newest college admissions ploy: paying to make your teen “peer-reviewed”
propublica.org
propublica.org
Yes, the SAT favors rich applicants who can afford to pay for (and spend time on) test prep. Unfortunately, rich applicants can also pay to boost whatever other signal is used by the admissions committee. Extracurriculars? Those violin lessons didn't pay for themselves! High School internship? Consider which families have the connections to find those opportunities. And now research papers...
I actually think standardized test scores are considerably less subject to bias than anything else!
IMO, the only actual solution is to specifically consider socioeconomic background as part of the admissions process. But everyone hates that because it feels unfair. And it is unfair, but that's the point—any system we come up with will be unfair, so we have to find the least-unfair one.
If they want to take all the money that's on the table, they have to admit all the kids whose parents they want to incentivize to donate, regardless of their test scores.
I found that only 2% of the incoming class would be theoretical white people who were admitted with legacy status and who fell to the left of 1 std dev in SAT score. If these people exist, I don't know what other circumstances might exist for them. Their SAT score is still high by US standards and they may be athletes or overlap with some other category for all I know or something else.
I think the below average legacy admit trope is actually deployed as a racial stereotype of white students that the SFFA, who are Asian, are using to gain access to Harvard. I don't think the hypothetical upper bound of 2% which is ~40 students is meaningful.
Now there is one issue with this which is that we don't have legacy student SAT scores broken down by race. But other sources suggest legacy students are disproportionately white. This is not true of the student body generally.
If anything, if Harvard only admits high-performing legacies today, it only bolsters the case for how much more legacies they could admit with a more opaque, "holistic" process.
Which, mind you, is something similar to other things they've done historically.
Can't have those pesky, studious asians suing the schools, after all.
"Rich" is the wrong word here and really distorts the comparison. A typical in-person SAT prep class is $1,000-$1,500. This is a one-time expense you can plan for over a number of years. That's affordable to the vast majority of the population in a country where 87% of teenagers own an iPhone: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/11/teen-survey-iphone-owne.... As for time, only 20% of teenagers work while enrolled in school. Only about 1/3 have a job during the summer. Yes, there are kids who are homeless, etc. Spending $1,000 and a couple of days a week in the summer going to prep classes might not be achievable for kids in the very bottom rung of society. But it's quite approachable for kids in the lower middle class and up. It's not only the "rich."
By contrast, a lot of college resume boosters are only available to the rich and well-connected. Lower middle class probably don't know anyone who works at a human-rights non-profit who can help secure an interesting internship. Most parents don't have the time to get their kids involved at the Olympic level in some obscure sport. As a matter of geography, many of the things that stand out to admissions officers at elite universities don't really exist in middle America; and the things that do, such as involvement in high-school football or FFA, are looked down upon.
There's also a matter of cultural capital. Pretty much everyone knows you should study for tests. That's a no-brainer, and accessible to all cultural groups. But figuring out what will pique the interest of some WASP in Harvard's admissions office takes special cultural knowledge. I was joking with my wife that our daughter's diversity essay should be about going to Bangladesh and getting in touch with her fundamentalist Muslim roots (my dad's grandfather was an imam). But we hang around enough rich white people to know that's not what they mean by "diversity." Instead, it would be far more helpful for her to go back to Bangladesh and fight against Bangladeshis to legalize abortion. That's what they mean by diversity.
Given that the Ivy League is only 33% non-Jewish white (compared to ~55% of the US population), and Jewish students have a ~12x better chance than non-Jewish whites at Ivy League admission [1], and are 7x over-represented compared to their US population, while whites are 0.56x under-represented, maybe it's not WASP cultural knowledge you should be targeting.
With the SAT, motivated kids are on the most level playing field in the history of civilization. And that's the best you can do without making society much more redistributive, which no one in this college admissions conversation is offering as an option anyway.
Frankly, I think hating on the SAT is either woefully misguided, or a cynical ploy to appear good without being good. And in the case of elite college admissions committees, I lean towards the latter. Am I supposed to believe that the people running these elite institutions can't think of simple stuff like this? They probably thought it all through before announcing anything to us common folk.
...that actually sounds to me like it could be a great diversity essay, I don't think I agree with your interpretation.
These resources are essentially free - there's not much that an in-person class teaches that isn't available in a test-prep book from the local library.
Now, you need to know the book exists, go to the library, check out that book, read it, and do the exercises. Having a parent pay for classes dramatically lowers that bar (they'll get you out of bed and into a tutoring classroom on a sunny summer Saturday), but, unlike virtually everything else on a resume, money can't actually buy you that much of an advantage on the materials available.
It seems to me that a good standardized test score is one of the only things that someone with a lot of motivation and talent, but very few resources, can use to distinguish themselves.
That's the way poor immigrant Asian kids and rural whites did it a generation ago. Nowadays, CRT activists are trying to get "holistic" criterions to be used by admission committee. [0] You guessed it, they also argue that the SAT should be de-emphasized.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian-...
This applies to all signals. "It will be gamed. No exceptions."
If you care about being equitable, there is no way to fix the elite university system. There are by definition only a few elite universities and they can only admit a small fraction of the population. Even if it were a lottery it'd still exclude the vast majority of people.
I feel like a lot of the over-the-top "wokeness" coming out of places like Yale is a case of "they doth protest too much." The vanguard institutions of an inherently discriminatory elitist system of conferred nobility are trying to deflect from this by blathering about diversity. The nobles are lecturing us about how woke they are in the hope of distracting us from the fact that we are not and probably never can be nobility.
The only real solution is to make that system obsolete. A person should be hired on the basis of their ability to do the job well. Nothing else. No degrees. No name dropping. No elitism based on what region of the country you're from or where you went to school. Just ability.
Colleges would only be able to justify their existence (and cost) by arguing that they are good places to learn and hone one's abilities. This would not only be more equitable but might allow people to get into the workforce without a writ of indenture in the form of a giant student loan to repay.
And how do you do that? The reason education is considered is because it's a signal of who can do the job well.
I'm willing to bet that anyone who knows any area well can do the same thing. A construction worker can probably talk to someone for 20 minutes and tell if they can work on a construction site.
It does mean that bureaucrats who don't actually know an area can't hire people for that area, but they've never been good at that.
For qualified interviewers secondary signals are only useful at the initial filtering stage of deciding who to interview. For that I've found that some mix of (has gone to any college | has worked in the field | has side projects or hobby projects in the field) combined with just describing the job and asking them if they could do it is good enough. Then a quick 20 minute call determines if they're worth talking to more. Then a longer call with some questions and involving other team members, then maybe a test project and/or reference checks if possible.
It would also require that your interviewees are not comprised of psychos willing to take whatever measure necessary to get what they want (i.e. play the game/talk the talk) — which usually does not happen when a lot of money or power is being offered.
Less connections than being able to get to and from a non-paying internship.
For some strange reason they are often summarized as "test prep had no effect".
But yes. If only because of the time constraints of the test (and it's more than that), sitting down and taking the SAT cold would be really hard for most people without prior exposure to similar tests. Heck, I'm pretty sure I couldn't today. I'm guessing I would do pretty well on verbal but too much of the math would be way too far in the past. And I wouldn't have time to derive formulae even if I remembered enough first principles to do so.
Test prep certainly helps. Knowing that test prep helps is key knowledge that is suppressed by these studies. Having the time to engage in test prep is often a luxury. Having the skill and discipline to do effective test prep is a lot to ask.
This is part of what colleges are selecting for.
Of course, heaving learned the material in the first place and doing a modicum of test prep so the test isn't a wholly unfamiliar thing is still important but it's probably fair to say that the SAT is far less gameable by spending money than many things.
10% of applicants getting the top marks 1600/1600 - which happens on other tests! - would indicate a problem.
Its not just rich, it favors boys across all economic classes. I think one of the ideas was that de-prioritizing SAT/ACT will get more women into stem.
[1] https://feed.georgetown.edu/access-affordability/women-incre...
I propose that similar to age and gender, college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications. If there is indeed an advantage of going to a better school than this will manifest itself in the actual interview process. If there is not, then it will be quickly realized that it doesn't make any sense to jump through these hoops to go to the better schools and thus the problem solved.
It's unlikely to happen as most legislators in the USA went to the very same schools that one is attempting to gain admittance to - a clear conflict of interest.
That's never going to work for specialized jobs. If you need a chemical engineer, than you need a chemical engineer.
But I think this is a very good idea for all of those jobs that just say "4 year degree required" without any specialty. Honestly, I don't understand how such postings aren't already illegal under structural discrimination.
Whether college is required at all is also an interesting discussion.
You get a degree. You can prove that you got the degree from an accredited university, if that university is providing some cryptographic form of that degree, without revealing the name of that university.
This only works if multiple universities sign on to a ZKP scheme, because (obviously) if only a single university did this you would know which university it was.
Especially with affirmative action, it's way harder for a White or Asian male to get a spot at some universities.
Sorry if I was unclear, I agree. My point was there is a difference between good state schools and random schools. The latter aren't bad. They just take vetting, as there's a greater you-get-what-you-put-in dynamic at play.
Not always easy to do.
That's part of the reason why school name matters a lot more for MBAs than software developers.
I've seen a huge variance in MBA-graduate quality between schools, to the point that if you're not graduating from one of the top schools I question the value of not only the degree but the candidate for failing to see that. As for undergraduates, the value the top schools deliver is consistency more than quality--you're unlikely to be horribly embarrassed by the Stanford or Georgia Tech grade in a way you are one out of ASU.
Nobody has time for that. Not comprehensively, except for very senior hires or limited-scope roles.
I'm exhausted by the current narrative that says we can't demand excellence from public institutions.
Like why not. Why can't universities, the police, the department of homeless services, or the guys who regulate airplane safety not be competently run and effective at improving society? Why can't we improve them?
> college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications
By saying maybe we could, instead, try to improve the reputations of our best colleges so the signal would be valid.
They don't reward this bullshit resume padding because they are confused they do it because they want to.
The incentives for college administrators are basically all financial at this point, it's about tuition and donors. Like I said, academic culture has been overtaken by the culture of financialization.
Consider this thought experiment - what would you do if you wanted to publicly say you did "need blind" admissions where you really promise not to look at the actual financial status of applicants at all, but you actually wanted to avoid admitting too many people who weren't going to pay full price?
If those were the incentives you were facing, then you'd try to come up with signals to use as a proxy for just asking applicants if they are rich.
Can we see what's going on here now?
We need to aim closer to the root, at the economic concentrations in society that all this competition is about trying to access.
In a world of independent artisans, we wouldn't need to worry so much about all this status and hierarchy and gatekeeping.
But there are a handful of FAANGs that reign unnaturally like giant totalitarian states. It's like we have Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, when we're supposed to have The Netherlands, Italy, Thailand, Vietnam, and so on. Instead it's like some Tsar expanding over the whole of Eurasia. And you need to get into the bastard's court.
The most prominent example is Greece being drained of Euros and of its young workers who have no choice but to go to work in Germany. Then the Germans complain about immigration without realising that they encourage this with their economic policy. They think these things are two separate problems that require separate solutions, when in reality they are the same problem.
What does that mean?
I was picturing a graph with time on the x axis, difficulty on the y, and a fairly constant value until recently, at which point things began to increase rapidly. I had in mind instability and explosion, a mania like for tulips, and self-destructive involution, like a society locked in competition with itself to pass the Emperor's exams.
Why an exponential? I know that, in contrast, finance people speak of things going "parabolic". But there may be reason for literal exponentials, for dx/dt = x. It's not that difficulty begets difficulty, but that difficulty arises from economic concentration and concentration of opportunities, and economic concentration begets economic concentration.
Let me put it another way: It's extremely destructive to a society if too much effort is channeled into zero-sum competition within that society.
I used to think that these actually were genius kids that spent their free time pursuing scholarly pursuits and somehow befriending professors.
But what I've seen happen (multiple times) is that a lab PI convinces one of their grad-students/post-docs that "it would be a great mentorship opportunity for you to have <highshool student that just so happens to be my friend's kid> finish up that project you've been working on".
The end result is that some well-connected kid gets credit for the whole project on their applications, but the grad-student/post-doc that has already done 95% of the work just has to hand it over and can't use/publish their own experiment
And getting published in a non-science journal probably provides a much weaker signal. For cultural reasons, lots of families wouldn’t even think it would be worthwhile to have their kid published in say a social science journal. (My dad, who has a sociology degree, told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t allowed to major in the subject.)
Really it’s another reason that college admissions should just be based on test scores and grades. If the kids are poor—give them an $1,000 scholarship to take an PowerScore class. (That’s just a fraction of what even poor school districts spend on each student annually.) Everything else is so wildly subjective or unevenly available to kids around the country.
Just make it simple. Stick with the SAT tests. There is nothing more equitable than standardized, rigorous testing. It will not be perfectly equitable because people do differ in their abilities, but they do differ less on that front than their parents wallets do. Which is of course why it's the more privileged households that love lobbying for these bogus qualifications instead of just doing merit based tests.
Just remember a simple fact, intellect is distributed on a Bell curve, money follows a power law distribution. Whenever you're concerned that merit based processes may have unequal results, anything that can be turned into pay-to-win is going to be worse.
That's what poor people will do and it is easy to filter for degree mills. Upper middle class people will pay PhD students to add their kid name to decent papers as second author. Rich people will pay PhD post doc to put their kid as first or sole author. Billionaires will sponsor Nobel laureate lab and have kid as co-author on ground breaking paper that will get 1000+ citations in first year.
Pretty much only because of this scam - so an automatic 'fraud' signal IMHO.
This is just so foreign to me. Either that service has very convincing salespeople that have wormed into her brain or she's living in a very odd academic bubble.
I've met lots of college students and most of could barely write a coherent by the time they graduate from college. No way is "having a published paper" a pre-req for admission.
The same reason they'd have any number of other (real, non-scam) competitive advantages in applications, a combination of aptitude and privilege allowing it to be recognized and to have the opportunity to exploit it.
I could also see a highschooler collecting data, maybe? Like, you don’t need a college degree to go down to a local lake and test water quality, right? Would that warrant a spot on the list of authors?
Keep in mind that when you're talking about the Ivys, they admit a tiny fraction of the people who apply and a huge number of people don't bother applying because (probably correctly) they don't think it's likely they'd get in.
Behavior 3-4 std dev out may be quite a bit different than behavior at the median.
I really just don't see one as great criteria. Or quality of papers to be anyway decent.
And for those geniuses, maybe they could have exceptions made for.
My wife worked in an academic hospital affiliated lab during her PhD, and every summer they had several of these children of lab friends "volunteering" as research assistants. Some were so colossally incompetent, messing up equipment or never showing up, etc. it was a net productivity loss.
Pretty much only because of this scam - so an automatic 'fraud' signal IMHO.
For reference the comment I was responding to implied that the ONLY way for a teen to be an author on a paper was because of this scam. I was pointing out that that is obviously not the case.
Simply ignore publications for the obvious reason --- they are easily faked and authorship is suspect. Problem solved.
Edit: Okay, if a kid's family bought him an Axiom Space ticket or few, that'd clearly be better.
And the better a college is perceived to be in the current higher ed environment, the stronger that incentive is.
All without any discussion, because it was a "peer reviewed" "paper".
We often get groups like this trying to sponsor our events and buy emails of our students. It's disgusting. We also sometimes get their counselors trying to "collaborate" with us to get one of their projects published.
The competitive college application process and supporting industry of consultants is creating a generation of sociopaths. We are teaching young people that the way to get ahead in life is to lie, cheat, steal, exaggerate, and hire consultants to help you do it with class.
Over the past few months, I have spoken with some of the admissions leaders behind "top" institutions. They say that in many cases, it's hard for them to tell the difference between these applicants and "real" applicants. Most CS programs still don't even look at the GitHubs of applicants!
With AI generating content would be simpler than ever...
Ouch.