Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Or - even better IMHO - it is admit almost everyone, and then have some tough exams (e. g. ETH Zurich).
Apparently the top 1% make up 14% of Ivy League undergraduates [1]. This doest directly translate into 1,300% more likely to be admitted (wealthier people are more likely to apply) but at a glance it would seem that the very rich are advantaged in college decisions mostly because they've got strong academics, test scores, extracurriculars, etc.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/college-applicants-from-fami...
If you have enough drive to get good grades and your parents are worth many millions of dollars you have an excellent chance of being one of society's future leaders, you're they're perfect candidate.
Yep, they sure did a "heckuva job" picking America's President when Yale picked George W. Bush.
Is 200% higher acceptance greater than 0.1 GPA or 10 sat points?
Both households can try to "push hard" but what the rich household can do for a child is a strict superset of what the middle class one can.
A lot of Ivy League school entries are "legacy" which means a parent went there.
Remember if you let in a minimum number of something that means you wouldn't have without a limit.
Legacy students aren't more gifted academically or they could get in as part of the academic pipeline, right?
While certainly it has been shown that students with better upbringing perform better on such things the amount of that is way less than the difference in students.
Thus it isn't as simple as "those who are given all the tools do better" there is also an aspect of something else.
After all "they are just better students" would imply only a similar increase in application acceptance.
The is a large trend of "overrepresented groups are just better" again and I prefer to push back on "I don't have evidence of why else there is overrepresentation so obviously it is fair"...
Especially when Legacy is literally the opposite of fair.
If we let things fall into a reinforcement loop the result is a bimodally educated society: from there does the intelligentsia then go and rule over the rubble?
Differentiation based on traits is not stable across many generations, and the commoners will always eventually generate individuals who are better along whatever dimensions than the aristocracy does.
I don’t think we have to worry about this problem, so long as we prevent the actual corruption. If we are really looking at merit, the families will cycle out after a few generations (again, we do have to prevent the actual corruption).
You answered that:
> it functionally doesn’t work well.
We're not talking about taking the dregs of society and throwing them into ivy league schools: we're talking about people who didn't have 4 years of debate team and lacrosse and water polo but still managed to do quite well for themselves.
It creates a better environment for everyone involved, since like you noted, creating an aristocracy has traditionally not worked out for either side of the coin.
/s (if that wasn’t obvious)
My point is that letting in applicants by (aspirational) merit does not create an aristocracy, even if some of the high performing applicants are wealthy. Aristocracy is created through corruption of (aspirational) meritocracy, because you need some non-(aspirationally-)meritocratic force to hold the same families in place generation after generation. They won’t continue to perform well forever. If they did perform well forever (again, they don’t), then aristocracy would be a more workable system than it is.
- low-income families are 3x more likely to have problems with their cost: https://mottpoll.org/sites/default/files/documents/031819_Pa...
- many programs and activities that stand out aren't likely to be offered in poorer school districts
- the time outside of school hours they take has a cost: it can be in terms of needing additional transportation, or changing childcare plans for example.
College applications don't measure aspiration, they measure proxies for aspiration we've long known are flawed and heavily affected by wealth.
Honestly it's telling that affirmative action was struck down which in turn is threatening legacy applications, and not the other way around, when it's well known historical fact legacy applications started out as a way to keep out immigrants: at the end of the day these schools have been putting their endowments ahead of what benefits society, and that's not really how things should work.
This is a failure of K-12 public educational systems for not preparing students as well as high income families can.
I think the biggest difference is that kids without family money don’t have the option to coast.
They may not have had teams of tutors, one for each subject, but I guarantee you that they worked with people at some point in their academic careers.
BUT, children of the affluent are able to access much greater educational opportunities than children of less wealthy parents. This means they have a better education and are better prepared to pass the entrance procedure at the best Universities, while equally capable but poorer children are disadvantaged from the outset. However strenuously denied, the suspicion that "people like us" are being selected is difficult to avoid.
I went to a second tier University where many of my fellow students were affluent but not good enough for an elite University. Even then it was clear that their life experience and future expectations were vastly different to my own. I have, I believe, succeeded on my own merits in the UK tech industry but even so I have ended up financially and socially below where the affluent kids started.
In a class based society birth and/or wealth are a far greater determinant of life success than talent or any other attribute. In this, the UK and US are identical.
Does the entirety of human history offer as examples any other type of society?
It seems that people making this argument and its similar variations severely discount the heights they have attained. Your kids are one of the 3-5 most important things in your life, so what could be more ridiculous than the idea that you shouldn't have agency to improve their futures? And if you do, then you should expect to succeed more with more resources to the extent that the greater resources don't cause your own character flaws to achieve escape velocity in magnificent ways that stunt your children. If that's not true, a lucrative business of child-rearing consultancy should rapidly emerge to fix that.
A mediocre rich kid is still gonna get trounced by a smart poor kid on the SAT.
The data presented in the article shows how, after controlling for test scores, the wealthiest children get enormous preference on all the non-standardized factors that people want to replace standardized tests with.
Dropping the transparent and standardized metric means the wealthy will game the system in ways that are only going to be harder to detect. Money buys extracurriculars and niche hobbies and elite coaches/trainers/tutors/etc.
It only benefits the rich and mediocre.
No, it shows that they get higher ratings (“preference” would be ratings for the same objective facts) on the existing aggregate of the other factors used in admissions, which is not:
(1) Showing preference, (2) Showing the advantage on each of the factors, or the particular ones which would actually replace standardized testing in any particular evaluation.
The usual concrete recommendation I’ve heard when anyone discusses it is to replace the role of standardized testing by filling its weight by expanding the weight of the existing other objective academic criteria with which it is highly but not perfectly correlated, largely removing the test prep issue and the cost factors it involves, but not upweighting other non-academic factors (which have cost, access, and network factors much stronger than standardized testing does.)