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

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

#221

Post by eagsalazar2 » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 1:43 AM UTC

ALL schools should pick randomly from all applicants. I mean, honestly, I don't feel as passionately about this for colleges, but private preschools or kindergartens that select kids based on anything is super f-ed up and kind of enrages me. The gradual defunding of public education in the US as more and more people move to elite districts or private school (white flight) is bad enough. Then excluding any kids who are slower learners, more hyperactive, who have less advantages at home (the kids who actually need great school the most) even if they have the $$ is borderline Nazi-party-bad it is so vile.

Generally my take on this is: (1) all schools should select kids at random from applicants and (2) private schools should charge selected kids based on what those families can afford, up to their full tuition which in the Bay Area averages over $30K/year, (3) funding for every school should come from national or at least state level so travesties like Piedmont can't exist explicitly for the purpose of robbing poorer kids, 2 blocks away, from having decent schools (and parks, that's another subject).

Anything else is hyper regressive toward children. F-that!

(sorry to hijack the topic, but this is a subject I deal with a lot and royally pisses me off)

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

#222

Post by secondcoming » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 1:43 AM UTC

hardwaregeek wrote: post #130

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…

> Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools.

Have you never been to school?

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

#223

Post by starpilot » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 1:50 AM UTC

Don

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

#224

Post by renewiltord » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 1:54 AM UTC

The whole point of going to top schools / universities is to be around other kids who have the drive, ambition, wherewithal, and societal advantages that you have. Then you get to benefit from the parochial altruism. Why would I go to a random uni when I can aim at the rich person uni?

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

#225

Post by aroundtown » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:07 AM UTC

hardwaregeek wrote: post #130

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…

I think an interesting result of this has increased the snobbishness/elitism of UT Grads. Older UT Alums (prior to the 10% rule) are pretty chill people, but the newer ones are universally entitled jerks.

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

#226

Post by lotsofpulp » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

jldugger wrote: post #217

emddudley wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford private schools. I would assume this is the case for 95% of Americans. You must have had a different experience? My family was not wealthy so I did not get a cho…

Obviously your family moves freshman year to optimize your chance of getting into UT /s

I’ve had plenty of discussions with people on how they plan to move from starter homes to homes in more affluent areas so their kids can mingle with richer kids and go to their schools.

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

#227

Post by a1369209993 » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:15 AM UTC

shajznnckfke wrote: post #186

tzs wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they take into account what you intend to major in? Not all UC campuses offer all degrees. If you are in that 9% and want to major in, say, mathematics, will they try to make sure that you get into one of the campuses that offers that?

I feel like this policy would be too easy to hack - just find out which majors are only offered at UCB or UCLA or whatever school you want to go to.

Why are there any majors that are only offered at a single school? That seems like a much bigger problem than people being able to pick which school they want to go to.

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

#228

Post by a1369209993 » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:33 AM UTC

tomp wrote: post #121

tchaffee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. "drunk…

To be fair, "it's impossible to implement this principle, and every attempt inevitably backfires" is, if actually true, a pretty damning criticism of a underlying principle in its capacity as something you'd actually want to implement.

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

#229

Post by a1369209993 » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #165

eanzenberg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The better scenario there is: A has a solid proposal and they're a known good quantity on the "speaker circuit" B is a newcomer and their proposal looks really interesting too--maybe even more so--but we don't know them so maybe A is the safer choice (I'd argue that this is the way that a lot of conferences have historically operated and many still do to some degree--which is OK to a point. You don't want to exclude…

Sure, but to the extent that you're going with the safe easy choice, you're not deciding based on merit. There are cases where that makes sense, but the ones where it doesn't aren't a problem with meritocracy; they're a problem with giving up on meritocracy.

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

#230

Post by dpeck » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #219

hardwaregeek wrote: post #130

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…

> This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic. One of the common complaints higher performing students have is that they are dispersed in their classes and very bored as the teacher teaches to the lowest common denominator. Now, that is classrooms, not schools, but you have schools that try to accommodate gifted students in their own tr…

This is playing out at a massive scale with virtual learning. Large amounts of kids in the gifted program and generally “smart” kids have been pulled a week in. there is little value in keeping them together with kids below their academic level in this environment since all the social aspects are gone.