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eroo

Steven Pinker offers a very convincing dissection of the referenced Deresiewicz article [1].

[1] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league...

TL;DR:

- Deresiewicz is willfully ignorant/misleading in his pursuit of being controversial.

- Ivy league students are smart, but there are smart students everywhere.

- Admissions to Ivy league schools is not as objective as it should be. There is too much focus on fluff and not ability/potential (e.g., meaningless "volunteer work").

- College isn't for everyone, but if you're going to go, an Ivy tends to be the best place because they have the most resources (and therefore are often counter-intuitively the least expensive).

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That is a great read. It has been posted several times but didn't get much traction, unfortunately.

> Admissions to Ivy league schools is not as objective as it should be. There is too much focus on fluff and not ability/potential (e.g., meaningless "volunteer work").

To expand on this a little bit: he describes the current admissions systems as "eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism that jerks teenagers and their moms around and conceals unknown mischief" and he laments that "test-based selection used to be the enlightened policy among liberals and progressives, since it can level a hereditary caste system by favoring the Jenny Cavilleris (poor and smart) over the Oliver Barretts (rich and stupid)."

(aside: I don't understand why the parent story was modded into oblivion over the course of 10 minutes)

Pinker goes overboard in the opposite direction. He is against "wholistic" admissions because he despises, for entirely good reasons, the current outcomes. He should focus on legacy admissions and sports.

Universities with first tier art, theater, and music departments can't rely on SAT scores for admissions to those departments.

I heartily endorse requiring community service work. While some people will be impervious of learning anything, a few days working in a food bank will expose you to people who smell like cigarette smoke and spend money they badly need to put by on lottery tickets. If you don't get to see they are actual human people and not abstractions, you might see only abstract solutions.

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