Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is there good evidence this makes a difference in the outcome of their children?
Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
271–280 of 307 posts
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but students don't make that choice. Parents do.
You don't think parents make decisions based on what they believed to be in their child's best interest?
If they can’t afford to, they don’t. Welcome to America. Most working people here simply don’t have this kind of flexibility.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#273We 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
I mean, the basic idea behind an elite school is you have: * A community of rich folks who get to look smart-by-association * A community of smart folks who get networked into the power networks All the decision-makers would lose out on this. Why would this even fly? George Bush Jr went to Yale and Harvard. He looked smart. And, a bunch of people were friends with the President. Folks like him make the laws.
Yeah this is really funny to me. Articles like this fantasize about being able to apply some engineering solution to a problem as if just having any good idea is sufficient to force some third party to implement it. They complete ignore the incentive system the thing lives in so as to make their analysis a total waste of time.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Students from disadvantaged backgrounds would have a really hard time getting into college, even though many are extremely smart and have great potential to succeed at college If they’re smart and have potential to succeed, a meritocratic measure should rank them favourably. The problems with tipping the scales too far are (1) it’s inefficient, in that the total likely production of the student body is lowered and…
Both my undergrad uni, and the university I am teaching at, in Pakistan, have an outreach program, where they find ~50 excellent students from the poorest sections of society, and give them a full ride (tuition + living expenses). Some of these students would not even have gone to any uni, let alone to some of the best unis in the countries. Based on my non-statistical observational view, these programs are insanely…
fellow paki, which uni is this?
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nowadays, the term is widely used in a positive way to describe 'creative minorities who bring real progress'. It is confusing to use the old opposing definition of the word 'meritocracy' when everybody else around you is adhering to the original meaning of 'merit'. Of course, whether or not we're able to accurately evaluate 'merit' is a decent question, but it is better to ask the question using metrics, than to try…
The point of the satire, and the point of TFA, is that measuring 'merit' is difficult, if not impossible, and a focus on 'meritocracy' will lead to promoting those that perform best at the measurable proxies to merit, not actual merit. It seemed worth pointing out that people are using a word conceived satirically to advocate for the very system that satire warned against . And it's an interesting bit of history.
Best at 'measurable proxies of merit' is exactly what I think people should speak plainly about and fight for.
But, instead we have people that think that because merit cannot be perfectly measured we should stop attempting to find meritocracy and instead to select randomly.
Random selection must be worse than a measurable proxy.
I gain nothing personally from this system, because I didn't travel through a top college. But I do not think it's in my interests to completely destroy societies way of selecting people into important positions based on some idea of 'merit'.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#276This ISN'T a social-justice article. Picking the top applicants backfires because people game it. For example, consider Students A and B who're mostly identical except Student A likes to binge on Wikipedia while Student B spends every night doing SAT practice problems. Colleges that select only the top applicants get the B's of the world, who optimize their observables, while the A's seem somewhat less competitive on…
Pretty much every admission system I have seen can be gamed in some way.
Standardized testing is probably the worst offender here, since while the absolute equalizer on paper (everyone gets the same test!) it really rewards over-fitting and learning how to perform well on one type of exam.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is an incentive regardless of UT's policy. The top 10 are always fighting to be number 1 or 2 and weighted classes make all the difference.
Yeah this is a serious defect in the high school system. Other than our valedictorian with an Eidadic memory got too marks in all classes, the rest of us who did band, a non honors course, all 4 years suffered from not getting a the weighted boost and ended up ranked a few places lower than our peers who got the same 1 or 2 Bs but took honors theatre or honors debate even if they actually liked band or track team bet…
That's the reason I like having some classes as pass or fail. It really encourages students to take some classes that are out of their comfort zone and try something different. Else they'll stick to the optimal path and might miss out on some things they might have been good at.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#278Earlier 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…
You make it sound like it’s preordained that people like Bush make the laws and smart people should be grateful that they get to attend elite universities to network with the heirs presumptive of future presidencies. In reality, it’s the rich that benefit by getting connections to a network of future political operatives, academics, media people that allow them to use their wealth in order to advance their political…
You're seeming to miss that it's a two-way street. All of those folks also want to be connected to the rich so that they can potentially get funding for whatever their idea/project is and get access to networks of the wealthy. These elite institutions provide an interconnection point between two different networks, the networks of the wealthy and the networks of the highly intelligent.
It is pretty much pre-ordained that those are intelligent and those who are rich will find ways to network with one another so that both of their causes are advanced. For the highly intelligent that might be getting funding for a startup idea. For the rich that might be having access to network effects to cement their political power base.
It's not that the current system is inevitable, it's that any deviations from the current system which may be possible are relatively minute when it comes to this particular facet. All of human history has told us so.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean bottom of the rung, E1. You can do 2 years of community college and enter a couple of ranks higher. But...you can't. At least, not that would show up at Basic. The higher grade you get for sufficient vo/tech or collegiate study prior to enlistment is applied after graduating from Basic. AFAIK,that's true even for the programs where you enlist with guaranteed OCS after Basic, you still are an E-1 when you go…
Sure you can if what is meant by “a couple ranks higher” means a couple enlisted ranks. This can occur before leaving for basic. You can be guaranteed E3 out of boot camp with enlistment incentives and each platoon generally has at least one merit promotion E3 (aka ‘honor grad’)
Right, and all the programs I referred to are also guaranteed promotion after Basic as well. But you'll still be an E-1 in Basic and so if you are looking at some outstanding scores on something posted for E-1s in Basic, well, it's possible those E-1s are people who enlisted with a guarantee of higher grade on successful completion of Basic, not starting at the bottom except insofar as everyone enlisting starts at the bottom in Basic.
Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)
#280One 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…
> 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…
That's the whole point --- to take away the top 5% power to buy their way into college via a fancier high school.