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Comment by SilverElfin | Hacker News Reader

Legacy admissions and holistic (discriminatory) admissions should be disallowed as long as these universities receive public fundings directly or indirectly.

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Yep, I think these two things can be true at the same time:

1. Admitting a certain amount of students based on legacy status is not necessarily a bad thing

2. A University should not be eligible for taxpayer funds if they have admissions like (1) or similar holistic criteria.

In a society as diverse as America I think 2 is a fair line to draw. And the universities with large and powerful alumni networks where legacy admissions are most relevant have the least "need" for public funds. They have huge endowments.

I think you could still compromise on 2. by requiring legacy or other discriminatory admissions practices to be a small percentage of the students they give full ride merit scholarships on, or similar.

This is particularly so because the advantage of this kind of school is networking, and it's in the interest of the disadvantaged to give them opportunity to network with the advantaged.

But it's also no big deal if we don't make that compromise.

Public money is precious, and we should think really hard about taking money from the general public just to give it to wealthy institutions any time we do it.

I like this idea, like there could be tiers of grant eligibility instead of all or nothing.

I there is a difference in funds given gratis, and funds used to pay for service rendered.

There's also a difference between giving money to a school, and giving money to a student to buy an education they want

Id be interested to read about some "holistic" admissions success stories. There must be by this point tons of examples of students admitted "holistically" who are now doing great things because of the opportunity they were given.

Most, if not all, Canadian admissions are holistic. All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad. As a result, for undergrad at least, no one really cares what school you went to.

From outside looking in, the American system has a hilariously unequal system. Certain opportunities are hoarded by an insanely small set of schools, almost entirely based on "prestige" and financial dominance. And it's this crazy arms-race/pressure cooker to get in. But once you're in, grade inflation is everywhere and people aren't actually working super hard. No one freaks out about admissions to "mid-tier" schools. It's entirely about a select coterie of schools who people rightly perceive as gatekeeping to an incredible extent.

None of the schools actually emphasize being accessible and hard to graduate from. The incentives are all weird and cater to a small elite population. The name on the degree is more important than earning the degree.

I dunno about other colleges, but Caltech you earned the degree. Many students dropped out because of the workload. There were a couple that were able to coast through, but they had IQs easily over 160.

They didn't do legacy admits as far as I knew.

But what it's like today, I have no information.

You should be extremely skeptical of people who claim to have tested IQs above 130 and also believe those tests are not inherently noisy at the top end. Many modern tests lump everyone with 130+ into the same category [1]. An IQ of "easily over 160" is not a clinically valid finding by any standard IQ test that I am aware of.

This is because standard IQ tests are generally designed to measure around the median of the distribution (70-130), and so there is a lot of variance in measurement at the top end. If you happen to have a bad testing day and you make a dumb mistake, your measured IQ might drop by a fairly large number of points -- or, conversely, if you got lucky and guessed right, your measured IQ could be much higher than reality.

For example, the original Raven's Progressive Matrices says [2; page 71]

> For reason's already given, Progressive Matrices (1938) does not differentiate, very clearly between young-children, or between adults of superior intellectual capacity.

where "superior intellectual capacity" is defined as an IQ of ~125 or higher, and (if I am interpreting it correctly), the table on page 79 of [2] says missing a single question could drop a 20-year old from scoring 95 percentile to scoring 90 percentile. That's 5 IQ points on a single question! If you had a bad day, or didn't get enough sleep, you could test significantly worse than your actual "IQ."

Anyone that actually has an IQ of 160 with even a modicum of self awareness should understand that the IQ test they took is inherently noisy at the top end of the scale because sometimes people have off days.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification#IQ_classific...

[2] https://rehabilitationpsychologist.org/resources/SPM%20with%...

Consider that Hal Finney was next door to me in the dorm. I've never met a smarter fellow.

I agree that actually measuring his IQ would have been a dodgy idea, but there was no doubt he was a unicorn. He himself never made any claims about it. It was just something you realized about him after a while.

I agree with you that smart people exist, and I have met a few in college as well.

The main thing I want to add is that using IQ to quantify intelligence at the top end of the scale is scientifically bogus and in my opinion harmful because it validates depressed / insecure / chronically online people who use their "160 IQ" as a way to put down other people or to peddle pseudo-scientific nonsense. Those people often need genuine psychiatric help and (in my opinion) such validation only harms them.

I'm sure that Hal Finney was exceptionally smart, though. :)

Hal hid his intelligence. You'd never know it until you got to know him. He was well-liked, and even put up with the likes of me. (A lot of techers put up with me, and even generously helped me to not flunk out. I had a lot of growing up to do.)

I would have had a lot less trouble with Quantum Mechanics if I'd realized that nobody understands it, it's just that the math works. I thought it was just me that thought it was crazy.

I've heard MIT was similar. But their graduates have never had quite the prestige and easy in to influential circles as the boys (eventually girls, too) down the street.

Same at Georgia Tech.

It was easily the most work and effort I had to put into anything, tons of peoole dropping/failing out, and the average GPA for most students was not that hot. Definitely not close to the well-known Harvard-tier 3.65+

Thats the exception then; at Stanford all you need to graduate is a pulse.

In CS/CE/math/physics?

Walter, can you give a rough timeframe to go with that anecdote?

It was the same in the '90s. Something like a third didn't make it through in 4 years, although a long tail managed it in 5 or more.

A classmate dropped out in his sophomore year, and 10 years later asked to come back and finish. Caltech said sure, and aced the courses and earned his degree.

I asked him, were you smarter after 10 years? He laughed and said nope, he was just willing to work this time!

(Another gem about Caltech - once you're admitted, they'll give you endless chances to come back and finish. Your credits did not expire.)

One of my friends finally graduated after 6 years there. He endured endless students mumbling "7 years, down the drain!" as they passed by. (The line was from Animal House.)

late 70's

Assuming you work in tech, that's because the only school that matters is Waterloo and 90+% of Waterloo students move to the USA after grad.

Almost all our Canadian hires have been at Waterloo at some point. Even when we do random resume pulls and interviews, Waterloo seems to have the most competent set of candidates when you’re talking about new grads.

Because they already have 2 years of experience due to co-op.

> All the universities are pretty easy to get into as long as you have the grades, especially for undergrad.

The is partially true but leaves out an important difference between Canadian and American admissions. In Canada you are admitted to a particular major, not the university as a whole.

E.g. At the University of Waterloo, CS and some of the engineering majors can have < 5% admissions rate and are extremely merit based. At the same time, applying for the general Bachelor of Arts at UWaterloo is uncompetitive and very easy to get admitted.

Pretty sure this is true for most universities in the US as well. It was for me nearly 30 years ago at a big state school

> But once you're in, grade inflation is everywhere and people aren't actually working super hard.

Clearly you’ve never enrolled in a EECS class at Cal

I was #3 in highschool out of a 550 graduating class. I thought I was bright.

Went to Cal for mechanical engineering, and while I survived the engineering classes, the physics classes wore me out and the math classes were almost impossible for me. I barely made it out of there.

I honestly wish I went somewhere easier so that it wasn't a constant struggle to keep up and survive. I think I would have actually learned more.

I took a Math 1A class (intro to calc) at Cal where the prof turned his back on class at the start of the hour, then proceeded to mumble incoherently for 60 minutes while filling a chalkboard with equations. He’d turn back around at the end of the hour. Many students brought pillows. I learned literally nothing in lecture.

This professor wasn’t demanding, he was just making zero effort to actually teach.

Great researchers are not necessarily great teachers, especially for intro courses. Anecdotally, I think this is a common issue at “prestigious” schools.

I know that feelings but be assured, it’s better to be mediocre when you’re surrounded by amazing people than to be the best in a place where no one cares. I can guarantee you learnt more than other places even if you don’t feel like that at the moment.

I've had 20 years to think about this, and while it was always fun to get the positive vibes telling people I went to Cal, I still think UC Davis or SLO would have been better.

It's not like my only other option was to go to CSU East Bay, although I know people that built decent careers from there too to be honest.

I’ve heard people say this about difficult colleges or degrees before, so you’re not alone. The push to make something overly hard can simply leave some capable people behind by not matching their style or pace of learning. But also I think some of the less famous universities simply care about teaching while the top ones leave that to random grad students and instead brag about their research credentials. The thing is, professors doing research doesn’t help students learning.

I think all that matters is that most if not all professors care about teaching. And my experience at top universities has been that most still care about teaching and the grad students they need to rely on is because of the class size. There were definitely some that were basking in their own glory from the past, but those were few. Can’t tell about all universities, but I’d assume it’s the same everywhere. The reality is that given what it takes to become a tenured professor, you’re bound to have at least a few who generally suck at teaching.

It comes down to the notion that America is a classless society being farcical. There has always been an elite that jealously guards their power and influence. Entrance into it - or the ersatz version that is the bourgeoisie - has always (along with immigration) been modulated based on what was most likely to preserve the existence of that elite.

And it's not a conspiracy; it just shows how much power that elite has, that they're able to make these things happen when they need them to. A sudden turn away from nativism and condoning of proto-anarchy when the black population (first slave, then free) threatened to upend the social order. Socialism lite (and more immigration, but only from preferred European nations) to head off full-blown socialism after capitalism first drove to excess and then blew itself up. Truman getting the VP spot. Bank bailouts (so many bank bailouts). Even the begrudging "opening" of elite institutions to Jews, blacks, Asians (staring down the barrel of their own, rival, institutions).

Anything to prevent their power and influence decentralizing in an enduring manner.

Isn't the point that _all_ admissions from a range of institutions over a period of years (decades?) were "holistic" admissions, and thus basically all post-college success stories are holistic success stories? Further, _it's actively harmful_ as well as unfounded to post-hoc try to say that person X would _only_ have been admitted under a holistic framework.

In the same way, if up until last year, your company had any form of DEI, it's pretty toxic to point to any of your colleagues, claim that they were diversity hire and their success is a credit to DEI policies b/c that undermines them in a way that's impossible to provide evidence against.

The implication that "you were only <hired or admitted> because of a policy that gave you credit for <trait/circumstance>" can't have a factual basis unless you have all applications and notes from the admissions/hiring deliberation process, which the person in question almost certainly cannot.

This has actually been one of the ideas floated by regulators.

The idea is that merit based admissions is actually pretty complicated, so we can allow individual universities continue to experiment with their own implementations and approaches.

However, we can hold them accountable by grading them based on retrospective data.

Maybe the way would be to correlate all admissions with success, and add a feedback loop.

I read somewhere that people who graduated at the top of their class generally became average with respect to success.

Also, I suspect success has to be quantified, which might be hard.

> Also, I suspect success has to be quantified, which might be hard.

I wouldn't say hard. It's expensive, time consuming, and the people who can perform qual to quant conversions usefully need to have a foot firmly planted on each side of the subject matter fence.

More to the point, nobody's really interested in compiling this kind of data. Adding dimensions beyond income to your definition of "success" would result in e.g. revealing there isn't anyone from your school successfully practicing family law.

This may not count as “holistic”, but my grand-uncle went to City College of NY when it was both open admissions and free. He had the equivalent of an 8th grade education in his home country.

He ended up with a BS in Chemistry, went on further academically, and eventually was the general manager of a big factory (I think for GE, but not 100% sure) in the 80s before being killed in a car accident.

There’s a million stories like this. Most debates about who is more “qualified” for what in this context boil down to subjective vibes about whatever people think. At best, it’s pride in Ivy League education, at worst it’s some racist nonsense about the “others” taking status and jobs away.

I went to a random state school that some would eyeroll at. Life has been fine, and I’m glad I didn’t waste my time pursuing some bullshit admissions process.

Seems reasonably. You and to discriminate? That's disappointing, but nobody is going to stop you, but the public tax dollars sure as hell shouldn't support your discrimination

Gating based on SAT is literally discrimination. It is also not fair, because those kids got lucky being born to the right parents. But just because it's discrimination and unfair, doesn't mean it's bad.

Other types of discrimination are bad because they create effects that make society worse overall (more sectarian or class-based tension, more corruption, less growth).

Taxpayers, exercising their own self-interest, should pick and choose the good types of discrimination to support. There is no need for morality here.

TLDR, I am in agreement with you, but I wanted to frame the argument in this way.

The entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory. If going to your average state university with high admissions was okay then there wouldn't nearly be as much drama.

If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.

> If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college.

Depends on how you define "elite", and I assume you mean some sort of hereditary or economic-class-based definition. But elite colleges could (and should) still work if they run on competency-based merit. I believe elite talent in as many fields of endeavour should absolutely be catered to.

> The entire notion of "elite" universities is discriminatory.

Well, when you put it that way, many things are discriminatory, for better or worse.

> If the elite colleges are not comprised of the rich and well connected it beats the entire point of an elite college

The functional purpose of a meritocratic elite is to concentrate the smartest and most ambitious in your nation (in each generation) so they can cross leverage each other. This dates back to feudal societies switching to a civil exam system during Enlightenment. (Also in imperial China.) That’s a productive form of discrimination.

I think it's the opposite actually. I think the moment you're consciously, systematically trying to optimize for "smartest and most ambitious" on a meritocratic basis is the point in which your respective field falls into decline and is relegated to slow, incremental improvements rather than revolutionary jumps. Primairly because "the smartest and most ambitious" are more about seeing that specific field as vehicle for wealth and prestige rather than actual passion. Many of the legends of the past were not good enough for the elite institutions of their time.

I mean really, it's the question of why this over preexisting patronage systems. And looking at the "achivements" of this so-called "meritocratic elite" this last century (especially in enshittification) leaves alot to be desired.

It's just one self-serving 1% attempting to ursurp another 1%. And they certainly aren't going to be solving your problems. They don't have the ability to solve the coordination problem, the housing crisis, involution, climate change and Donald Trump.

> Primairly because "the smartest and most ambitious" are more about seeing that specific field as vehicle for wealth and prestige rather than actual passion

...why? STEM programs have weed-out classes for a reason. Astrophysics PhDs, similarly, are not vehicles for wealth or prestige, but must (and do) filter out below-standards candidates early.

> And looking at the "achivements" of this so-called "meritocratic elite" this last century (especially in enshittification) leaves alot to be desired.

That wasn't created by the meritocratic elite, that was created by the "preexisting patronage systems" where rich pays to get their kids influential credential so that they can continue to have outsized influence on the country...

> They don't have the ability to solve the coordination problem, the housing crisis, involution, climate change and Donald Trump.

The current system is what caused those, why do you think that is much better?

>The current system is what caused those, why do you think that is much better?

I don't think it's better. But I don't think it's worse either. It's exchanging one elite for another with the similar incentives. But what I would object though is how the education system has been essentially appropiated as a system of elite differentiation (and social mobility) rather than improving the 80% as function of overall social welfare. Why are we caring about a handful of colleges compared the hundreds of others we have? The opportunity cost really is to better spend our resources and time pushing up the average, mediocre student rather than focusing on all these unproductive signalling mechanisms. And I think from there, that's where the real saviours will emerge.

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