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Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

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Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#121

Post by tomp »

tchaffee wrote: post #73
hliyan wrote: post #23

Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is…

The concrete example I often give is that as a conference organizer we decide to be a meritocracy. Great! As a fair meritocracy, all else being equal between speakers a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done. Experience should count right? So let's look at it in detail. Fred and Sarah both submit great talk proposals. But Fred has done ten talks and Sarah has done nine, so he gets the slot. Looking back…

You're conflating the principle and the implementation. Meritocracy is good in principle, but your specific metric is bogus. Feel free to criticize the implementation/metric, but that's not a valid criticism of the underlying principle.

As an analogy, safe driving is a good principle. Assessing the safety of a driver by past behaviour ("this person hasn't crashed in a while") is decent but biased metric. E.g. "drunkenness" might be a better metric. But the choice of metric doesn't (in)validate the underlying principle.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#122

Post by rjkennedy98 »

murgindrag wrote: post #118
newen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that GWB went to Yale made it possible for him to become President. Elite schools make it easier for people who have money (but aren’t too academically inclined) to get into positions of political power by building credentials and connecting with a community of smart people.

Isn't that exactly what I wrote? The whole point of elite schools is to give rich people appearance of intelligence by association. If you take 2000 valedictorians and 500 rich douchebags, have the 500 rich douchebags pay to educate the whole lot, and everyone comes out with a common brand stamp, who benefits? Answer: Everyone involved! Taking away federal funding (as if that were politically possible) would slow it…

> Answer: Everyone involved!

What about the rest of us? Did we benefit that George Bush (who claimed never to read a book at Yale) got the certification of an elite degree? What you are saying is the equivalent of saying everyone in the mafia benefited by being part of the mafia.

And btw before anyone talks about how Yale (or any other elite school) is private and can make their own decisions - no - they receive MASSIVE amounts of government funding. Princeton receives more per capita government funds than Rutgers.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#123

Post by eanzenberg »

tchaffee wrote: post #73
hliyan wrote: post #23

Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is…

The concrete example I often give is that as a conference organizer we decide to be a meritocracy. Great! As a fair meritocracy, all else being equal between speakers a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done. Experience should count right? So let's look at it in detail. Fred and Sarah both submit great talk proposals. But Fred has done ten talks and Sarah has done nine, so he gets the slot. Looking back…

That’s a weird take though.

>> a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done

Why? That’s not a meritocracy, it is tenure based. Tenure does not always correlate with merit, so the basis of your example is moot.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#124

Post by bilbo0s »

murgindrag wrote: post #118
newen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that GWB went to Yale made it possible for him to become President. Elite schools make it easier for people who have money (but aren’t too academically inclined) to get into positions of political power by building credentials and connecting with a community of smart people.

Isn't that exactly what I wrote? The whole point of elite schools is to give rich people appearance of intelligence by association. If you take 2000 valedictorians and 500 rich douchebags, have the 500 rich douchebags pay to educate the whole lot, and everyone comes out with a common brand stamp, who benefits? Answer: Everyone involved! Taking away federal funding (as if that were politically possible) would slow it…

This is true. Taking away public funding is what a lot of people at some of these schools want. It's an opportunity to completely eliminate the riff-raff.

Even in my own state, the flagship university was threatened with a cut off of public funding under the previous governor. It was a bit of an open secret that internally to the university, a large number of people wanted the funding to be cut. This would mean they'd no longer need to carry the financial burden of all the automatic admits from within the state.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#125

Post by BobbyJo »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #40
fnord123 wrote: post #6

lol, why would they do that? Then they will be found out since the differentiator between the top pool of 'good enough' undergraduate programs is merely being able to play king maker to students who were going to go far in life anyway. And in return, the top students help brand the university as being top.

> lol, why would they do that? Basically, using academic aptitude as an entrance qualification includes/excludes different races unevenly, (Asians and Whites do better) so this is a way to get round that. Lowering the standards and using randomness is a roundabout way to discriminate against Asians and Whites, but not explicitly. Of course, another way of looking at it is that tests are racist because of the variatio…

Would it actually discriminate against Whites and Asians though? The pool of 'good enough' is likely very White/Asian.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#126

Post by abeppu »

A bunch of commenters here have gotten fixated on two questions: (a) "meritocracy" and what it means or should mean and (b) whether the value of top colleges derives mainly from being exclusive.

I think an interesting / illustrative case is the AMA as the credentialing authority for medical schools. An association of people in the profession, who have a clear interest in the supply of doctors being low, has a clear lever by which to restrain the future supply of doctors. Independent of which specific people get in and how, for the country overall, most of us would probably be better off if more people got into med school, if there were more med schools, and there were just more doctors working a decade from now. The important question isn't just who should get the seat, but which policy choice gives us a better health care system.

I'm guessing the same is true for other areas, but it's just less clear. Rather than asking "who gets to go to the best schools", more interesting is "what policies at the best schools give us a country we want to live in a generation from now?" or "what choice yields the greatest benefit, not just to the student, but to society?"

And if schools don't want to make choices from that perspective, if they want to operate like luxury brands whose goods are valued mostly because they're rare ... then maybe they shouldn't get tax exemptions around their endowments, or public funds, or the respect and esteem of a population that thinks they serve some higher, refined purpose.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#127

Post by bilbo0s »

rjkennedy98 wrote: post #122
murgindrag wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that exactly what I wrote? The whole point of elite schools is to give rich people appearance of intelligence by association. If you take 2000 valedictorians and 500 rich douchebags, have the 500 rich douchebags pay to educate the whole lot, and everyone comes out with a common brand stamp, who benefits? Answer: Everyone involved! Taking away federal funding (as if that were politically possible) would slow it…

> Answer: Everyone involved! What about the rest of us? Did we benefit that George Bush (who claimed never to read a book at Yale) got the certification of an elite degree? What you are saying is the equivalent of saying everyone in the mafia benefited by being part of the mafia. And btw before anyone talks about how Yale (or any other elite school) is private and can make their own decisions - no - they receive MASS…

The point he's making is that if the funding is removed, Princeton or Yale would no longer need to put up the façade.

So the only thing that would matter is whether or not the Bush-type families of the US benefit from the system that is in place. The commenter is positing that the answer is "Yes". I agree with that assessment.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#128

Post by dr_dshiv »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #27

We have lower-hanging fruit. If a college accepts students taking government-subsidised loans, or otherwise receives any federal funding, it should not be permitted to consider legacy [1] or institutional advancement for admissions. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

Why? I think legacy helps with the culture of a school. Legacy shouldn't get you in, but it should be part of the overall intention of class composition. If some 20% of people are good enough and have a family connection, I think it makes the institution stronger.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#130

Post by hardwaregeek »

One interesting example is the UT system. Because affirmative action was banned in Hopwood v. Texas, the UT system resorted to a program where they accept the top 10% of each high school's class into all UT schools.

It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic.

What I like about this system is that it helps a population that even the most altruistically inclined admissions office overlooks: the unprepared. I've met my fair share of students who are brilliant, hard workers but just do not play the game. Whether that's because of ignorance, fear of failure or some other factor, I do not know. They exist at every level; I've seen them for college, for tech jobs, probably for high school admissions. If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile.

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