US universities need to stop elitist discrimination that Europe abandoned
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
They think the UK and France are meritocracies when it comes to attending Oxbridge or the Grande Ecoles?
This doesn't stand up to even the most basic scrutiny. Cambridge doesn't even keep data on its students by income group. That's how embarrassing the numbers are. (Cambridge even actively punishes poor students by forbidding them to work at all while enrolled.) All Oxford will admit to is that 90% of the students come from above the UK's median income.
The Grand Ecoles in France are far worse. People talk about the opening of the Grand Ecoles to other social classes, but this is barely happening. They only started to open up in the 2000s and the opening has been extremely underwhelming. https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03119054/document
If Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford were as unequal as the schools this article is promoting people would lose their minds!
The only difference between the US and Europe: in the US people were upfront about the system. You got extra points for being a legacy. In Europe, they discriminate in exactly the same way but they don't make it so overt.
I'd rather have a transparent system that we can understand and where we can set clear goals, instead of an opaque system that fights even the most basic data collection and reforms.
Meritocracy is fundamentally unfair, especially for young people. Success largely depends on things beyond your control, such as talent, personality, and interests; genetics, family background and random chance.
I was somewhat involved in educational policy in Finland in the 2000s. Back then, one of the major issues was that meritocratic practices had started to decrease social mobility instead of increasing it. When higher education was expanding rapidly, most admissions were from working class / rural families. But once that generation started having children, their kids had a significant advantage in meritocratic admissions over those from less educated families.
The culture had also changed to make the meritocratic discrimination worse. Old-school socialists and rural liberals strongly believed that education was the key to success, both for the individual and the society. But over the decades, the working class started rejecting education. Their children, who were already academically disadvantaged, became less interested in higher education.
Even you were to have a fully meritocratic system it would still be massively biased to towards rich students and against African-Americans.
Rich parents simply have more resources to ensure their kids get whatever educational resources they need to get the grades needed for admission to elite universities.
We still don't know why African-Americans underperform other ethnic groups academically, but this is a reality and while this reality exists any fully meritocratic system will work against them. Our unwillingness to ask why African-Americans underperform is a huge part of the problem here. And I'll note this isn't just a US thing, it's similar here in Europe.
There really is no solution here – at least not at the level of university admissions.
The problem is deeper... At least one of the issues is that the quality of ones education depends a lot on the neighbourhood they grow up in. And African-Americans generally grow up in less affluent neighbourhoods. Minimising that difference and ensuring kids from all backgrounds have decent shot at getting the grades they need for university in my opinion should be the primary focus.
This is true of every social problem. The goal is never to make everyone happy. We can't give up making progress just because "perfection" is unobtainable.
People are extremely divided on this, and I think part of the issue is that it's just the wrong problem to solve so all you have is bad solutions.
Really? In which European countries are under-performing African-Americans a big issue? Can you cite some statistics?
Now, it's a bit of a weird situation because, officially, there are no "races" in France. There are no blacks, no whites, just people. But the government is working on tackling the terrible performance of schools in "priority areas" (read: impoverished neighborhoods and tows, which are "immigrant-heavy"). There's also been some dancing around the elite schools and their feeder prep-schools, which aren't very "representative" (read: "diverse" but without saying "race").
But I think kypro's point was rather about the local minorities in Europe, which are most likely not any kind of American, although many of them are of African descent (with the caveat that a sizeable proportion of those are not "blacks").
I want to pick at this a little, because we do know.
Generational trauma is a thing. I can point to specific ways that my parents raised me, to counter specific ways that my grandfather raised my father, which were in turn responses to how my great grandfather raised my grandfather. So why is it surprising that the factors that dictated the lives of the great grandparents of currents students shouldn't also influence how those students act today? Especially when certain aspects of the lives of those great grandparents are still very much in force today?
Just off of the top of head: African-Americans are more likely to be raised in single mother households. African-Americans are more likely to live in neighbourhoods with bad public schools. Due to socioeconomic factors they're less likely to have access to nutritious meals. They may be more exposed to negative social influences (gangs, rap music, criminality, etc).
What I don't understand is why these academic statistics are so correlated worldwide. In the UK there is no "generational trauma". African migration only really started in the UK post-WWII. While there was discrimination this is the case for practically all immigrant groups in the UK. Indians were arguably just as discriminated against, for example. Yet, Indians today do extremely well in the UK. They also do extremely well in the US. So what's going on there?
It's difficult to say this without inviting abuse, but I worry that some of this is likely to be genetic. Obviously there are other factors at play too, and perhaps they are the majority, but in my opinion this doesn't fully explain what we see.
But the larger point I would make is until we actually understand what drives these group differences, and then take measures to level the playing field, we'll never fix inequalities between ethnic groups. At least not without state force.
Wikipedia claims that most of the post-war immigrants came from the West Indies, predominantly Jamaica. You don't suppose there might be some generational trauma bundled into a group of people who were only in the Caribbean because of the British slave trade, lived on an island dominated by British colonial practices and culture attitudes towards those former slaves, and were now moving onto the (overwhelmingly white) British islands, the home of their great grandparents' former masters?
You raise an interesting point about Indians. In most of the statistics for the US I could find, the only non-white ethnic group that didn't show markedly lower performance was the vague "Asians". I have some rank speculation about what's happening there, but its just that.
I'm not sure I understand what "generational trauma" is but I'm certainly not dismissing it as part of the explanation.
My problem isn't with people like yourself – you seem very open to discussing this. My issue is that the public and politicians are not open and instead debate whether we should ignore the fact a fully meritocratic system would effectively discriminate against African-Americans, or if we should instead use state force to correct for these differences. It's just the wrong debate to have and it will never produce a good solution to the problem. The questions you're asking are the valid ones – even if I believe the answers are likely to be more complex.
This refrain of "its multi-faceted" and "we don't really know" feels a bit like that. We do know what causes all of these issues. Each and every contributing factor is well documented in isolation. So I'm responding to that.
However, we are (as you say) in full agreement that the actual answers are complicated. I'd go further and say the reasons why those are the answers are themselves complicated, and because they take more than an election cycle to effect. My claim is that it will take generations to rectify, if ever.
Not saying they should or shouldn't be dismantled, just bothers me to see likely misattributed motivations.
It's a debate or policy distraction that I think extends outside of the university and throughout the United States. It's as if the conversation around class inequality takes a back seat to the racial ones, and that the privileged take a very strong stance that it is the singular most important topic to address.
There are a bunch of other issues that affirmative action was meant to solve as well, but it did exist explicitly as a counterbalance to the fact that the universities felt they needed legacy admissions to attract donors. Its just also the case that, going back to Jim Crow, grandfathering people in was a great way to fortify racial disparity whilst not having any explicitly racist policies on the books.
I'll grant that it's being talked about more but even that is hardly surprising: affirmative action was struck down because it was deemed unfair to give some applications a boost over other applicants. Yet legacy admissions is exactly that and continues. It's hypocrisy and I don't think it's particularly surprising people point it out.
No, it's just that the hypocrisy of legacy admissions is even more evident now that affirmative action has been eliminated.
Also the legal argument is a bit more of a stretch and was probably doomed so long as explicit racial discrimination was allowed.
Ultimately, I think it's good because legacy preference is unfair to those born to the wrong parents. But practically, I think there's less impact here than I think most anticipate. Offspring of Harvard parents still have a bunch of economic, social, and genetic advantages. They're still going to have objectively the best academic records. It might cut down on Harvard parent => Harvard child but that will be replaced by Harvard parent => Random Ivy League child.
Citation needed.
Why would they even need legacy admissions if they outperformed the non-legacy admissions?
https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academi...
>Why would they even need legacy admissions if they outperformed the non-legacy admissions?
It's not clear that they do which was the point of my last paragraph.
1. Are SAT scores the only criterion for admission?
2. "Recruited athletes had an average SAT score of 1397, whereas non-athletes averaged 1501." How much of the 32 point difference in legacy vs. non-legacy can be attributed to the 104 point difference in athletes vs. non-athletes? Presumably most of the recruited athletes are non-legacy.
3. Where are the stats for affirmative action?
4. Averages don't tell the whole story. I'd like to see where the bottom is for legacy non-athlete vs non-legacy non-athlete.
> It's not clear that they do which was the point of my last paragraph.
Then there should be no debate about eliminated legacy admission. ;-)
If your only goal was to definitively "win" an argument and end all discussion immediately, then maybe it was a waste in your opinion, but otherwise it wasn't. The citation brought more nuance into the argument, and raised more questions.
If you want to do something about social mobility, you should presumably prioritize doing something about (2) over doing something about (1), because it affects a much larger number of people in a much deeper way. Yet, somehow, issues similar to (1) are the ones that receive a lot more air time in the media.
That's because most people's underlying motivations are a hatred for those at the top, which they then hypocritically paraphrase as a concern for those at the bottom.
> The Truth is, that tho' there are in that Country few People so miserable as the Poor of Europe, there are also very few that in Europe would be called rich: it is rather a general happy Mediocrity that prevails[...] It is true that Letters and mathematical Knowledge are in Esteem there, but they are at the same time more common than is apprehended; there being already existing nine Colleges or Universities, viz. four in New-England, and one in each of the Provinces of New-York, New-Jersey, Pensilvania, Maryland and Virginia, all furnish'd with learned Professors; besides a number of smaller Academies: These educate many of their Youth in the Languages and those Sciences that qualify Men for the Professions of Divinity, Law or Physick. Strangers indeed are by no means excluded from exercising those Professions[...] Much less is it adviseable for a Person to go thither who has no other Quality to recommend him but his Birth. In Europe it has indeed its Value, but it is a Commodity that cannot be carried to a worse Market than to that of America, where People do not enquire concerning a Stranger, What IS he? but What can he DO?
I re-read this recently, and was strongly reminded of it with the recent submission here of a blog post about the "New American University" at ASU. <https://nadia.xyz/asu>
I have a friend who is a nurse in a state that allows them to practice with an associates degree. some workplaces, mostly hospitals, require them to start the process of getting a bachelors within 2 years of joining the company. the bachelor program, has absolutely zero to do with the job. its literally humanities BS. we have a nursing shortage and the schools, in partnership with corrupt hospitals, need to bleed students dry of their money and time. many jobs could do w/o the university/college system, and simply just be vocational programs at fractions of the cost and become way more accessible.
As for your particular example that is also what I've heard. Except that the BSc is more business-oriented (not humanities). That being said, if you think something like nursing could be a vocation degree I don't think you understand how much even nursing relies on Chemistry, Biology, and Math. My nurse friends are regularly in charge of compounding drugs before administration for example. Loosening requirements will not stop the nursing shortage because it's caused by the same thing the doctor shortage is caused by. Long, thankless hours, low pay, high stress, and the nurses unions keeping headcounts in check. On one hand dumping the nurses union will likely see pay rise. On the other hand the unions are often the only reason nurse/patient ratios are kept inside of safe bounds.
The division you're talking about is why in CS they offer an ASc, BA, and BSc. You can pick just how deep you wish to go. Most people get a BSc because it's the most flexible. What people do not understand is pedigree matters very little. I paid ~$25,000 all-in for my CS degree from a decent (top 50) school. I am just as good as the MIT kids I work with through the magic of ABET accreditation enforcing a standard. Standards are good for everyone and people should be excluded from just calling themselves something.
Yes, for sure, but all of those classes are taken in the first two years, alongside clinical rotations. The remaining 2 years are almost exclusively NOT focused on hands on nursing/science/math/pharmacology related subjects. They are usually focused on healthcare policy and the soft science behind healthcare, which imo, can be learned on the job thru employer workshops/classes. That's why they let nurses practice with an Associates, because they've done their clinical rotations and stem focused classes to preform the job of RN.
If you cut out the pre-reqs and fluff classes, its pretty much a vocational degree. If we want to talk about social mobility, enabling people to earn wealth faster, is a good way.
I used to feel that way strongly. All of this made sense when most people could go to a state school and earn their way through with little or no loans. Today being a well rounded student with some great friends and a bit of independent living at a state school is likely to still saddle you with a 6 figure loan.
So even though I really thing the above is the right way for people to pursue an education / career after high school, it simply makes little sense for a lot of students. To the end I'd really like to see more institutions like WGU that allow you to get through school a lot more cheaply by doing everything remotely and measuring outcomes rather than measuring grades and the number of classes you took. And somehow we need to convince employers that colleges like WGU are the best alternative for a lot of really talented potential employees.
Let the student/purchaser of the education decide this. Not middle aged university bureaucrats trying to optimize the tuition profits. Give students the time back to volunteer or spend time locally working at hobbies/clubs. Not everyone is interested in Humanities, Arts, Diversity and Multiculturalism. They likely received 100s of hours of that in k-12. Time to be an adult.
TL;DR: Traditional college maybe made sense before college debt became an albatross around college grad's necks. Time to find more reasonable alternatives for those that don't want that albatross.
This is the only part I can read before the paywall kicks in. But I wonder why they think that top universities are the drivers of social mobility.
This isn't just an Ivy League problem - this is a problem that has an effect on the entire college admissions pipeline in the US (plenty of Ivy/UMich/UVA caliber students took seats at top public+private programs, students meant for top public+private programs ended up at regional flagships, etc). As the number of seats is finite, this leads to a massive misallocation across the board.
That said, the same kind of elitist sorting still happens in Europe - it's just done at the grade school level instead
Children of well educated parents almost always end up at a Gymnasium from which their career path ends up leading them to a university degree. Those in others types of schools have a tougher path leading to university education and will most likely end up in the equivalent of community colleges, vocational training or apprenticeship. Since recommendation by teachers counts for admission to a Gymnasium and this is often subjective, children of parents from less privileged backgrounds (blue collar workers, immigrants etc.) often end up in other schools. Sometimes this is an example of how society is stratified - a place for everyone and everyone in their place.
Apart from the public schooling there are also private schools which are almost entirely for children of very well to do types since they come with a significant fee.
Where it does get selective is at the prep-school level. But AFAIK this is based on the high-school grades, and it would seem that being very good in a "bad" high-school nets you better chances of being picked than being average in an "elite" high-school.
Classmates of Sarkozy's and Lagardère's kids at École Jeannine Manuel will continue to leverage their network from there no matter if they attended a Grande école or a random generic university. And there are plenty of schools like those to this day in France.
This is the exact kind of network that Americans complain about with regards to legacy.
Most HNers did well enough on their SATs and ACTs to attend a target public school or non-legacy private like UC Berkeley or MIT respectively, and around 75% of students at Harvard didn't get in via Legacy admissions yet we (rightfully) still complain about that 25% who leveraged their network and class background to get in.
I doubt that if they were somehow forbidden to put their kids in the same school, Sarkozy's and Lagardère's kids would be total strangers and completely unlikely to "network". Just as there are cliques in all schools, even if their kids went to the same school as younger me, an immigrant, we would probably not have been friends, just like I was friends with kids whose "social level" was close to mine.
Yep.
Most reputable schools in the US are actually public flagships (UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UT Austin, UWisc Madison, UWashington, Georgia Tech) or private universities (MIT, CalTech, CMU, JHU, Amherst College, Pomona College) which don't actually consider alumni or legacy.
There are 2 concurrent trains of thought in opposition to legacy in the US
1. It's an insult to the meritocratic nature of the US. (I agree with this aspect)
2. Any kind of networking is an unfair advantage (I disagree with this, but plenty of HNers and Americans in general appear to agree with this)
In the US, there is an assumption that after legacy is removed, there is never a need for legacy and someone from Podunk State will have equal standing as an MIT graduate all variables being equal. This is never going to happen, as you know well in France as well. ENS or SciencesPo grads will always be viewed as "better" than, idk, Université Toulouse II (not picking on Toulouse, just randomly selecting a city and number).
Plenty of Americans want to remove this kind of hierarchy, period. In reality, even if that happens, networking will continue and elites will continue to send kids to elite grade schools.
Schools, plural? I got the impression that Eton alone was more than half of them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_the...
I studied politics and quickly realised there was a huge divide between those of us who wanted to study a broken system from the outside and those who coveted being one of the jeering boors in the House of Commons. Helped me lose whatever faith I had left in the political system.
( * not public as in the US sense but in the UK sense - yes it's backwards)
Grandes Écoles students are correlated with higher social classes, but that's due to socio-cultural background, family discipline, ability to dedicate to 100% to syudying without taking a student job, etc. more than anything else. Admission are purely on anonymous competitive exams, and no amount of money will get you there if you suck at them.
Foreign students are something else though.
Ah, the typical French delusion that entrance exams make Grandes Ecoles admission somewhat fair.
The fact is that most of the students who succeed at these entrance exams and land position in the most successful of Grandes Ecoles come from the same highschools. These highschools all happen to be in Paris or Lyon and due to how the French system works, your family has to live in one of these very affluent and costly neighborhood for you to attend. Amusingly, practices which are mercilessly squashed by the administration in most highschools throughout the country like skill-based sorting of students or going at a faster pace that the official curriculum are tolerated in these few highschools. I let guessing where our elected politicians put their children as an exercise for the reader.
As usual in France, there is one rule for the plebeian and another one for the ruling class.
As I mentioned, it's highly correlated with students socio-economical status; now at least it's not conditioned on your grandparents stuffing an Ivy League with money, with your parents having time and money to send you on tons of extra-curricular, your family having been at Eton for centuries, or your father being an oligarch and sending you to Switzerland at 18 y.o.
You can spit on and scorn us and our system all you want (it's quite in fashion on the Internet, I'm sure you'll get a lot of upvotes for it), but at least it tries; and in my experience, it's the best one with the ex-soviet ones to balance high quality education with meritocracy.
> As usual in France, there is one rule for the plebeian and another one for the ruling class.
Sure, that's so typically French. It's true that Eton, Princeton and Beijing University frequently display students coming from the most remote and poorer part of their country.
Sure and I went to ESSEC after doing my prépa in Tours and grewing up in the countryside. Guess where did 95% of my classmates came from. The plural of anecdata, something, something…
The system is utter garbage as was pointed by Bourdieux decades ago. It’s not even cheap which could have been its sole redeeming quality. Social mobility indicators in France are even worse than in the UK, a case study of what not to do.
Then you got shafted. It's a couple of hundred euros per year when you're on a stipend.
> The system is utter garbage as was pointed by Bourdieux decades ago
And what did Bourdieux propose?
I was talking about what it costs to the state. You do realise it’s heavily subsidised, don’t you?
BTW, what did Bourdieux propose?
Bourdieu didn’t need to propose anything. He proved data in hand that the system was unfair. A quick look at the current situation of France should tell you all you need to know about how effective the system actually is.
But finding ideas is not that hard. We could just get our heads out of our asses and copy what’s done in a country having better results. Spoiler alert, the answer is not a system generalising the structure of military schools to whole areas of higher educations put in place by a military dictatorship to curb the emergence of dissenting elites in the university system. It still baffle me that this has to be pointed to the average French. This country really deserves what it has become.
La crtitique est aisée, l'art est difficile.
> We could just get our heads out of our asses and copy what’s done in a country having better results.
Id est? The US system, where you can get a pass into an Ivy league if your granddaddy paid enough money, the Chinese system where any exam can be skipped with a few millions yuans, or the Russian system where the children are taken from their families at 12y.o.?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/14/this-...
Do feel like there’s a chicken and egg problem here, e.g. legacy admissions are more likely to land a plum job at their family’s business/through family connections so there isn’t a guarantee that those higher earnings are solely because of Ivy League attendance. But the pattern is there.
> By comparing two groups of waitlisted students — those who are admitted to Ivy-Plus universities and those who are rejected — they note that the successful are much more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution, attend an elite graduate school and work for a prestigious firm[...] One in six students at Ivy League schools has parents in the top 1% of the income distribution. This is not just because the children of the rich are more likely to apply to elite colleges. Nor is it because the children of the rich have higher academic scores than middle class applicants: Children from the top 1% of the income distribution (more than $611,000) are 55% more likely to secure admission than a typical middle-class applicant with the same SAT or ACT scores, and children from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in. It is because elite colleges deliberately discriminate in favor of the rich.
Neither chickens nor eggs need be harmed to see that this prima facie has something wrong with it.
1. <https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/C...>
Yes, going to these universities probably makes some difference, but it probably doesn't explain all the difference, so if you take poor but talented kids and have them go to these universities, I expect the salary difference is much smaller.
Sure, we can debate the exact earnings multiplier endlessly but it still stands that attending an Ivy League institution is better than not attending one. And attendance of those institutions is artificially gated.
There is more than one way to make more money.
Legacies are just one aspect of this, though it is particularly visible. Being able to break into that is a huge leg up, not just for you but for people around you in society. And being kept out reinforces that your group isn't suited to that kind of wealth production, even though it has nothing to do with either your skills or the quality of education you received.
The article is arguing against legacy college admissions.
Instead in the European model while Alumni is not considered, those Alumni have a generational advantage that often makes it so that these children end up in the same place as they were born. In the same way it can be very difficult for children born into lower class families escape from the preset paths in life that they are given.
In Japan you have to be admitted into a high school program and from their the trajectory of your life starts. All the way into the College process. It's not a fair system yet it's ranked 15.
I'm hoping to invest in the company that knew I'd be working on Python long before it was created.
This is simply untrue. It might have been the case a century ago, but is certainly not the case anymore.
someone who can work 80 hours a week can do that in 10 months or less. especially if you're already an engineer and you're good, it's a breeze.
undergrad is dead simple, it's literally built for teenagers, it's not hard to get back on track.
I don't think it's necessarily bad that the education system tries to identify students which have low odds of making it in higher education, and offer them an alternative route that results in them having an in-demand skill and some work experience when they graduate at 18 years old.
I'm not at all convinced that an approach where students of all levels are kept in the same classroom is better for the weakest students. I imagine the experience of struggling (and often failing) to keep up every day must be exhausting and demotivating (and perhaps even humiliating). I also have never seem any evidence that such an arrangement is better for weak students in any metric (but I'm happy to change my mind of this if such evidence is provided).
I'd absolutely love more details on this...do you have any sources? Also, what makes 'most'? 51%?