Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

You know what trick I love?

When someone points out something Democrats did and they say "that's why I'm conservative" then when you point out something Republicans did they say "We need more than two parties"

> they select for students that had the luck (or the right parentage) to go to either a private school or to a public school in a well-funded school district.

They select for math ability, it just so happens that students with access to great resources get better at math than those without them.

> The result is that the student base will be overwhelmingly white rich kids, which is pretty problematic Pretty clearly not true. It is overwhelmingly asian kids and while wealth plays a factor, poor asians still do exceptionally well (IIRC poor asians do better than rich whites). This can never be acknowledged because it makes people less sympathetic to your point.

> purpose of academia - that is, to provide education and research opportunities to the actually gifted instead

A students innate ability is irrelevant for college admissions. What matters is what are your actual capabilities. Are you capable doing mathematics at the highest level or are you not? An innately talented student who is bad at math due to life circumstances out of their control is still bad at math.

Here are some of the connection. The SAT is a basic test where strategy can come into great affect. And honestly, it's surprising how little some of the strategy is talked about -- but I suspect amongst the wealthy it's well known.

But back to the topic. A 1550 on the SAT says very little about your mathematical ability. The test just doesn't measure your ability to do more than basic algebra and has no real measure of writing ability. And honestly probably has a somewhat inverse relationship on your ability to read nuance into text (which is one of the first strategies I teach -- this isn't English class -- there's no nuance in anything you read on the SAT).

On advanced college math -- kids who are actually good at math likely have a high math SAT score, but their verbal score can vary a fair bit. I regularly see kids with 1400-1450 SATs, with perfect math scores who are Math Olympiad stars.

The likely end game of this though is that schools REALLY start teaching to the test. Why even offer AP tests if they don't help admission? Why even teach biology or physics at all? Simply teach SAT math, reading comprehension (which is comprehension of the worst kind) and what the SAT calls writing. So no more calculus or statistics. Even most of what is taught in algebra II is thrown out the window.

Today the 95%ile of SATs is around 1440. It would probably move up to around 1550, once schools teach to that test year around for four years. And any actually advanced undergrad courses are tossed because they can't get enough students to fill them.

And other countries will realize that the US left a huge gap -- the ability get students who strong in like areas and train them. They'll target the best math students, the best programmers, the best artists, etc...

Interestingly, the best meritocracy we have in society is sports. And in sports they recruit holistically -- that is they don't exclusively use HS stats (these are generally worthless) or combine numbers (these have some value, but limited). They use scouting services. And the very best athletes tend to congregate in programs that will develop them the best. Many hold up sports as a great example of meritocracy, yet it actually doesn't rely solely on measurables (in fact they are moving further and further from it).

What sports has though is a good objective function. What is the objective function of school? Answering that question will greatly help determine what the best path forward is.

Overly-liberal cities (SF, Vancouver, LA, etc) are killing far more of their citizens with failed drug policies than COVID, and with circumstance they've engineered such as giving extra "safe" fentanyl to people, telling dealers they won't be arrested, and never institutionalizing against their wishes.

The difference between approaches isn't "lock them up / don't" or "my kids / their kids". It's not a left/right or conservative/liberal divide, it's on another axis - more about the philosophical difference of personal vs group responsibility and meaning vs nihilism.

We need to look at the path these front running cities are taking, and where everyone else will be dragged, to see the difference. The same cities which refuse to lock up a violent junkie will lock up a parent who complains too loudly to the school board. It's not that they aren't authoritarian, often more than conservatives. It's that they don't feel there's any degradation of the individual which is ultimately wrong. Like, an individual can "choose" to be a street whore and die painfully from heroin. That's valid. This is how all junkies eventually live and die, and without a strong moral consensus that this is all bad - for the junkie and society and that we must stop it, you can't make progress on the base issues.

Vancouver will leave a junkie in their own vomit, to continue hitting the drugs that almost killed them, because "nobody should be committed against their will" but it will fine or confine an otherwise fit college student who drinks in public, or who commits any of the other offenses the junkie is committing (littering, starting fires on the sidewalk, having a violent dog, openly carrying a weapon, and so forth). The junkie has somehow "chosen" his or her role and now it's a beautiful thing, like a butterfly, that should be left to unfold, unmolested, in the parks.

Portugal, often held out as a utopia for drug users, has a "not even once in public" policy where they will jail you and assign you to a multi-year rehab program. They know nobody wants to die in their own vomit, in the street.

We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress. Once we all look at things that way we can see that our policies won't actually be too different, or rather, it doesn't matter if they are and we can work in a spirit of cooperation from different angles rather than fighting about the issue itself.

Ultimately, Portugal is a more liberal society (for drug users) than Vancouver.

> We should focus more on mitigating the extent that difficult circumstances hinders learning not just manipulating selection criteria after it already has.

This is harder, but I agree the right place to focus our energies. The problem is that the people that want to solve the problem are those in higher education. The people at the root of the problem are probably the same ones that don't want to solve it. A bit of a catch-22.