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Comment by james1071 | Hacker News Reader

This is just another example of how absurd the US college system is from the perspective of someone from another country.

The purpose of a university for undergraduates is not to select people of character, budding entrepreneurs,sportsmen,people with rich parents or anything else-it is to teach an academic subject to those best able to succeed at it.

The way to select them is to let the academic staff who will be teaching them decide. They will do that by means of exams and interview. How hard is that?

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A. I'm currently serving as faculty at a graduate program, so I ostensibly have a say in the admissions process. This is my first year so I don't know how much time it takes, but I imagine a lot, even though the program is small. I don't know how in the world the academic staff can quickly filter from tens of thousands of applicants without some kind of broad benchmarks.

B. You act as if there is some absolute benchmark for "best able to succeed at [some subject]"...There is not. Sometimes the best engineers can come from people who hadn't initially aspired to be engineers and thus lack whatever credentials they could've built in their high school time. Sometimes character can be the factor in success, sometimes not.

Of course there is no magic that can decide who will do best at a subject-no one would ever suggest that there was and I don't see how that is relevant to my point.

That was, that candidates should be admitted on the basis of academic merit and that the 'right sort' of weaker candidates should not be given special consideration.

It may seem absurd to outsiders but it does make a certain amount of sense to me, especially in hindsight. I learned as much, maybe more from my classmates than I did from my professors, and am certainly glad that those classmates were people of character, budding entrepreneurs, and sportsmen (and all sorts of other eclectic types, yes even some friends with rich parents; connections come in handy later on). Had my University selected the entire class based on your criteria it feels like my experience could have been very different.

That is how a socially prestigious university perpetuates its elite reputation.

It admits enough of the brightest to ensure that it keeps its academic status and then gives special treatment to certain 'desirable' students, who give prestige to the institution in one way or another.

This would, of course, never work if the 'desirables' had to compete academically. They are thus steered into easier courses.

Of course, if the institution does not offer such easy subjects, it cannot play this game.

> The way to select them is to let the academic staff who will be teaching them decide. They will do that by means of exams and interview. How hard is that?

This debate is often framed as "Harvard vs MIT", where Harvard has been very successful in being ever more prestigious and important with their explicit "the smartest and the richest" strategy, while MIT is great, but not "near monopoly on the halls of power" great. The arbitrariness and thinly veiled racism of the admissions process is vexing, but they are crazy successful.

All that to say, it's not as easy as it seems it should be.

MIT cannot play this game, because it only offers hard courses.

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