Merit-based admission sounds good to me. Harvard is vigorously defending its "right" to continue to deny admissions to highly qualified Asian applicants out of nothing but pure racism, and somehow they are the good guys?
Standardized tests are bullshit, IQ tests are phrenology, class rankings are not comparable across school districts. Someone who was president of every club at school may be less able than a kid who had to flip burgers in the evenings to help make rent.
Merit to a university may mean "someone whose charisma and social connections will bring great repute to the institution" more than "a child prodigy who will burn out at 27 and end up fixing typewriters in his parent's garage because they actually had an undiagnosed mental illness growing up".
Merit may mean "a middling student smart enough to pass who will stick around working as a post-doc temporarily forever because they have no ambition beyond performing slave wage labor in exchange for the cold comfort of the known and familiar".
Any definition of merit is going to be irredeemably faulty. Like recruiting sporting talent based solely on stats without considering if the talent is an asshole who will destroy the atmosphere in the clubhouse and immediately get arrested for DUI after being signed.
I thought we wanted to let the market decide?
The government funding aspect is irrelevant. Nearly every business in the country receives some form of government funding either direct or indirect and they hire based on a wide variety of criteria. I was once hired to a position I would need time to be a productive in because I am a ham radio guy and my boss wanted someone to talk radios with.
Here in Sweden, if you do well enough on the entrance exam, we simply let you in, even to the best universities. This means that people other than hoop-jumpers have a chance.
So do home addresses. And skin colour. And parent's money. There are issues with all of those for different reasons. People saying IQ is problematic don't mean there's no correlation at all. Just that they can be culture / approach / etc. specific and we shouldn't treat them as an objective measure.
1. Meritocracy: Give a chance to the students with the best innate chance at real-world success
2. Self-preservation: Give a chance to the students with the best chance at real-world success
3. (implicitly) Don't let too many people in who don't further (1) or (2).
Those measures (SAT, high-school GPA, gender, color, income, ...) are weak predictors of (2). How couldn't they be? We live in a world that encourages feedback loops, making it difficult for the most intelligent and ambitious people to break through class barriers with any reasonable degree of success.
They're not good measures because (a) they're not even particularly strong predictors of goal (2), and (b) they're piss-poor predictors of goal (1).
By way of contrast, a compelling essay is much harder to assign an "objective" score to, but it's a stronger predictor of both (1) and (2) than the rest put together, especially at the top end.
The important thing to keep in mind with all of those though is that they're proxy measurements. We can't directly measure the future, so we come up with tests to try to guess less incorrectly. It doesn't matter which measure you pick; they'll all be "problematic." If you recognize that though, it's easier to move past a shallow thought like whether the measure is objective or not and toward a system that better align's with the university's goals.
Put it this way they’d much rather have Roberts or Obama as alumni than your typical 1600 SAT quant.
Whats the best metric to find the people they are looking to educate?
If we want the selection process of future leaders to be government regulated under formal education, then we should have a discussion on how such system should look like. The current system is a bit like the old fraternal groups, with the admission system being relocated to the university admission board. There should be better way to select future leaders.
There is no universal definition of what the goal of a university should be.
At the very top of Harvard's mission page it says, "Our mission to educate future leaders is woven throughout the Harvard College experience, inspiring every member of our community to strive toward a more just, fair, and promising world."
There is NOWHERE where they say anything even remotely like, "Our goal is to reward students who do well in high school coursework and testing." Nor do they say anything like, "The mission of Harvard is to teach as much academic material to students as possible."
In contrast Caltech says, "The mission of the California Institute of Technology is to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education. We investigate the most challenging, fundamental problems in science and technology in a singularly collegial, interdisciplinary atmosphere, while educating outstanding students to become creative members of society."
It's much more focused on solving science and tech problems and a focus on educating outstanding students. There is very little here about leadership.
And so you tend to see that CalTech has some of the top scientists and professors in the world. At the same time, even in tech/science companies, they occupy a small percentage of CEOs. Those aren't the people they are intending to nurture.
There's room for different types of education with different goals and metrics, including admissions metrics.
And anyone can create a university and say,"We look at grades and test score. We don't ask for recs or essays. Don't care about what your goals are. We stack rank based on GPASATAPs and then select the top N." That's a perfectly valid approach. I wouldn't want to go to that school, but it sounds like there are some students who would, and I wouldn't object to it.
So if I would attempt with a universal definition of what the goal of a university, it would start by being an institution that complies with the standards set by the Higher Education Act and is accredited by the U.S department of education. As part of the formal education system, the goal of the regulations and laws will be enforced onto those classified under it.
Which returns me to my original question. What benefit is there to be classified as formal education if they don't share the intention (and goals) of the formal education system?
College is no more a reward for school academic achievement as a basketball scholarship is for HS basketball achievement. They’re correlated but a lot more go into both.
Now if you said that admissions has favored African American students in the Affirmative Action era over Asian students then I'd agree. But Affirmative Action is also over per last year's Supreme Court decision.
And how do you know they continue to use race? You have access to data that the rest of us don't? Again, if you have data to support your claims then post a link.
Compare the numbers for MIT who is somewhat complying vs the Ivy leagues who are mostly not complying.
I agree my original claim is likely not true. I should have said >95% of Asian's SAT scores are higher than the median Black SAT score.
What people need isn't leaders, but the capacity for decentralised self-organisation.
Their decision to make education into finding or creating leaders is, I think, a terrible mistake and socially dangerous, and in a way exclusionary. If they are truly successful and are able to notice natural leaders and bring them into their institutions that might well channel the capacity of ordinary people away from decentralised self-organisation and into a pure elite society.
You can try, but I think it'll be hellish.
As so many people who hate the Ivies tell me, you can get just a good of an education at your local CC and state college. That option is available and they don't have the emphasis on leaders and they also tend to accept most people who are qualified.
The reasons people want to go to Harvard aren't simply because of the academics to be ordinary engineers.
I'm a Swede. I don't care about Harvard myself. But here in Sweden we some historically excellent universities, and some places that were a little second rate as we viewed it.
But the Germans don't care. If they get to be called professor they're happy, so they come, and they become professors at these once second rate universities, and then they put out research that is as good as any, and they have PhD students and everything, and the end result is that it's basically transformed our old second rate institutions into places actually producing good research; and apparently this is the way it is Germany. All their universities produce good research.
I think the future here, in the long run, is it should be that it won't matter where you go, only what you do, and I think that's something which should be, not just embraced universally, but pushed for deliberately, in all countries. If Harvard is really successful in finding potential leaders, then they are dangerous to society.
Furthermore, most of Harvard's graduates will be ordinary engineers, or ordinary physicians or ordinary practitioners of some field, whether it's what they studied.
And yea, most of Harvards grads will be ordinary. And they could’ve just have easily gone to UMass. But a higher percentage will be leaders. And that’s the reason they admit who they do.
Because they don't dismiss the places that I had dismissed, they transformed them.
Also, bullshit on IQ tests. They do reliably predict a number of socioeconomic factors, so I suppose they’re a great way to keep the poors out. How very “enlightened” of you.
Even if you believe that such tests simply reflect privilege and reveal absolutely nothing regarding innate talent, what difference does it make? It can be a point-of-time snapshot but it still doesn’t mean letting in low-IQ poorly-equipped students to Harvard will help them or anyone else.
Seriously? That’s your question? And you think these low income students are why you didn’t get into your school of choice?
Do you have data to back this up?
[Citation needed]
Just dont pick and choose students to disqualify based on race.
This is why Harvard students now need remedial algebra classes.
Asians don't believe this because our society is much more homogeneous than western societies. Correlation is often causation.
That sounds like an excellent reason to remove government funds.
On a closely related note, you are legitimately out of touch with reality if you believe any part of this is done with the intention of "merit". This is done to strengthen allegiance to MAGA and conservative ideology.
Does that sound a bit scary and fascist-like? You decide. But it's explicitly stated as the goal of this constriction on higher education in Project 2025. So, take it up with them, not me.
This administration has ZERO credibility to define what "merit" is.
I don't believe for one second that conservatives care much for it.
Are you referring to the defense secretary Pete Hegseth? He also attended Harvard so clearly there's some intersection in how both Harvard and the Trump administration evaluate candidates.