Colleges Want Students with Character, But Can’t Measure It

The issue really morphs from "How do I select the best students for my school?" to "What sort of arbitrary metrics can I use to filter down this list of already amazing students?" If I had to guess however, I'd say these schools, under the guise of character, are trying to select students that have the highest potential to give back to the university. "Oh this student does part-time acting? Well we will accept her on the chance she becomes the next Natalie Portman. This guy has a best selling app? Better put him on the list of potential Zuckerbergs."

I'm not an admissions officer (not even close), but that would be my best guess on what someone an admissions officer would do faced with the problem of having so many amazing students to fill their undergrad class 10 times over. At some point it no longer makes sense to filter on raw academic ability (see also, Google's "GPA does not matter"), and a purely random lottery would 1.) never actually be a random lottery (thank you alumni) and 2.) may massively favor one group of people (if I have to choose 2000 our of 33,000, and 60% of that 33,000 are asian from a 150,000k+ income family, you run the risk of homogenous class - if you have to ask whats wrong with this, consider this, would you like to work at a job that hired exclusively white men (or whatever race/gender you are)).

Another way to look at it would be this way: if you were given the task to hire a new team of software engineers, and once the resume's came in they all had, 3.9+ college GPAs, Ph.ds in CS, and multiple years of experience on your tech stack of choice, would you just "do a pure lottery" to see who works for your company? Chances are you might end up filtering them on the most circumstantial of metrics (i.e. "This guy was a Yankees fan, I don't think we would get along very well")

A college does a disservice to students to admit them when they will wash out.

My experience as a student at Caltech in the 70's was they did a pretty good job with the admissions. They selected for smart & motivated & interested in tech. As a result, living in the dorms full of this kind of people, there was never a dull moment.

I only knew a couple of students who clearly didn't belong there, and they soon left.

Thus they need to see beyond the present circumstances of each applicant and discern which will be most likely to excel, taking into account the impact of their 4-year educational process.

Some students from great backgrounds will fail to keep up in college. While some others who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are able to "catch up" and pass others in achievement by the end of college.

How can they predict those outcomes in advance? That's the question that the SAT and ACT were created to answer, and now we're finding that they don't actually answer it better than alternatives. In part because it is becoming clear that there is more to success in life than how well a person solves word problems.

If you asked high-schoolers (not necessarily even seniors) which of their peers would do the best in college, do you think they would give useful answers?

There is a benefit of being in a classroom environment when learning an advanced subject. You have a direct connection to the professor and other students, which is essential for advanced material. Plus you can easily go and talk to them afterwards for more details. I learnt a lot by going to professors office hours which doesn't work online.

Also, what about labs? Every science program I am aware of has a laboratory component. That cannot be done at home. Plus good luck trying to get universities to agree on what labs to do. Each university has different types of researchers who focus on certain areas, which is reflected in the labs selected. My former university, for example, had no particle physics people so any lab related to particle physics would be misplaced. Instead they had a lot of quantum people so the labs were more geared towards that. I know of another university that had a lot of particle physics people and their labs reflected this.

Another thought is research. How would undergraduates get exposed to research in your system?

Thinking about it more, having TA'd first year calculus, you need to be able to interact in real time with students. I think online resources are great and I recommended them to my students, but they cannot replace face to face interaction. This is something online technologies cannot replicate, so I say it is a bad idea to even do it for basic things like calculus, which is very fundamental to the sciences.

Personally, I think it is a noble goal, but unlikely. Instead, I think the universities should integrate online stuff in addition to in classroom lectures.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the university environment. Being surrounded by my peers in the same field really helped. I learnt a lot just by hanging around the various clubs. That absolutely cannot be replicated online.

I know someone who got most of an undergrad degree online, in a substantive field, by necessity -- she was a teenage mom working a job and caring for an infant in a rural town. Her mom told me the hardest things about online college for her daughter were the loneliness and crushing boredom. It's great that she had that opportunity. I'm glad she's tougher and more focused then I'll ever be.

The atmosphere at a small college is where I was able to keep up with my coursework. It got me out of my hometown. I got over my crippling shyness, and learned to interact with people in a civilized way. Graded assignments "forced" me to do the work.

In my view one thing we still don't know about online education is how many people can actually get through it. We also still don't genearlly know what an "educated person" will consist of, who sat in their parents basement for 4 years staring at a computer screen.

Humans are irrational by default (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDAzsZLvfPw). This is more or less proven in many behavioral experiments (Too lazy right now to source them) when people will do the obviously wrong thing based on internal logics.

Because of this, we can look to the irrational beliefs of people that influence the schools. Namely, social and physical proof. And the social proof has a major benefit: it's less likely that someone is bullshiting credentials if they have an actual degree to back it. http://xkcd.com/451/

Still, it will be a while before irrational opinions catch up (or are leapfrogged by locations like Ghana that embrace the new medium) and that there are ways to catch cheaters.

A test can be written with a bias that favors or punishes any group. I don't think its intentional, as it is quite difficult to create them without these issues.

A simple example to show the point:

    Which of the following is not like the others:
    
    A) Chicken
    B) Moose
    C) Cow
    D) Pig
    E) Dog

But if you come from an agricultural background, in addition examining the animals based on their Biological Kingdom, you might be tempted to say B, Moose: It's the only animal that has no role on a farm. B is not an illogical answer from that perspective, but within the context of the test it's likely wrong.

When people say a test has a socioeconomic bias, they're saying a question can become easier or harder depending on a student's economic background. The question above is easy for most of us, but would probably be solved slower by anyone who grew up on a farm.