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Comment by ketchupdebugger | Hacker News Reader

just like how a public company have share holders, an institution like Harvard have donors. They have to listen or else their source would dry up.

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I can't speak for Harvard, but I can address my own university: The pressure to resume using test scores came from the faculty, because we observed that there were an unusually high number of students admitted who were failing the math (and math-y) courses. We want people to succeed in our classes, not enter and fail out. No donors involved.

It doesn't seem like a bad experiment to have tried, but the results were negative and bad for the students, so time to back it out.

Public institutions get paid the full amount by everyone who receives a degree. Failing out is a discount that the school administrators don't want to offer.

For instance we're instructed by admin to never encourage students to pursue mathematics. They "must" be funneled through an academic advisor, who can establish whether or not this is worth the financial risk of them potentially failing. This is regularly presented as "improving equity".

We are a little closer to Harvard in that regard: we are private, but one thing we do is that our admissions are direct into the department, though handled centrally. But regardless of the incentive, it does nobody any favors to put them in a situation where they're going to fail. The students we admitted who are not doing well in the math classes are exceptionally strong overall, but our CS program is, um, rigorous.

>regardless of the incentive, it does nobody any favors to put them in a situation where they're going to fail.

There are a number of incorrect assumptions hidden in this statement. Foremost is the idea that academic failure is always regular failure. I know people who started in math amd pivoted after they didn't think they could handle being full fledged mathematicians, but who benefitted from the math they did learn enough that it was worth it to them.

Secondly, you can't know in advance who is going to fail, and people are not obviously better served by a strategy that plays it safe.

Colleges have limited capacity, and individual departments have even less. Given this information, what criteria would you suggest be used when determining admission into a department if not "likelihood of academic success?"

This is the core thing. Our acceptance rate is extremely low - under 10% for computer science. There are a lot of things we want to accomplish in admissions; _one_ of them is a statistical bias towards being able to succeed in the program. We obviously can't predict super accurately for a single student, but we try to create scoring criteria that result in success. Dropping the SAT caused a statistically significant reduction in success. We look at a lot of things, but, much as Harvard observed, a lot of those other things have even more bias. If you rocked the AIME, for example, we know a lot about your math skills, but there's a lot of bias ($$$) in which schools make it possible to participate in that, and there are a lot of students who will do well despite not having done AMC/AIME. Etc.

Beyond some basic literacy, you really need some filter on math. I tutored in an MBA program which, I assure you, was not at all math-intensive. There was some subset of students who were just clueless about basic high school math. (Read any of the first year MBA memoirs and this is sort of a theme.)

Even many of those who were not clueless definitely leaned on those of us who had worked as engineers to take the lead on the math stuff in group projects.

You're lucky.

Some schools continue the "social justice" movement further, ensuring that those you cited don't fail.

I'm pretty sure Harvard's endowment will thrive even if the donors go to zero. Harvard is more interested in prestige and public perception. That is their currency.

I see that Harvard's endowment is currently around 50 billion dollars. I suppose with good investments that could last for a long time, provided that Harvard doesn't need to dip into it to fund daily operations. Harvard's annual budget currently is around 5 billion per year.

Yes, and I would lump public (and even some private) companies into the pile. When all this went down it was certainly groundbreaking (at least to me) because in my previous 40 years on this earth I had never seen anything like it. There's a whole new dynamic now of seemingly wanting to "be on the right side of history" which has somehow translated to doing whatever is socially popular.

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