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

you would have to convince me of this. It was previously a WASP institution but I don't think it is anymore or has been for some time. There are still fencing teams and professors in tweeds but that doesn't make it a WASP institution, maybe one that borrowed WASP culture. The ethnicity of the current president and provost and past few say otherwise. I think WASPs have been defeated in the court of public opinion and Harvard is no exception in fact more sensitive to public opinion because of its global significance.

The root of your confusion seems to be thinking that I’m using “WASP” to mean “white people” generically.

I am not sure it really matters to admissions but I know what the difference is. No one will argue there should be fewer Hispanic or Black students. It will never happen, it is socially unacceptable. There is a lot of momentum to accept more Asians and Harvard can't possibly accept being called racist. The end result will be whites of all groups will be accepted less as the future goes forward in order to appease all the other groups. This is in spite of the fact that whites appear to be within a general SD of Asian test scores[1]. Of course it seems unlikely that the school would deliberately accept fewer Jews because that also seems like a socially unacceptable result given that there was previously a Jewish quota. That could never happen again.

But I think the stereotype of modern WASP as a lazy, corrupt, and dumb legacy admit is nefarious because no one really knows what a WASP is, it's not obvious, so any white student there could fit this. Also WASPs themselves are not necessarily this stereotype. Couldn't they be as hardworking and studious as any other group?

edit: my point here is that Harvard admissions policies and lawsuits just seem like blatant evidence of ethnic conflict in the US and WASPs are a scapegoat who I don't think even have a say in the policies. Also here is the current fencing team[2]. Doesn't look WASPy.

[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american...

[2]: https://gocrimson.com/sports/mens-fencing/roster

> [W]hat I think many people outside our profession don’t understand is how unfortunately unequal all aspects of secondary education are in this country. And unlike some other inequalities — like access to fancy internships or expensive extracurriculars — our empirical research shows the SAT/ACT actually do help us figure out if someone will do well at MIT.

> It turns out the shortest path for many students to demonstrate sufficient preparation — particularly for students with less access to educational capital — is through the SAT/ACT, because most students can study for these exams using free tools at Khan Academy, but they (usually) can’t force their high school to offer advanced calculus courses, for example. So, the SAT/ACT can actually open the door to MIT for these students, too.

My argument is not "Poor kids universally have time to do what they want." It's hard for me to believe you are having a good faith conversation, or even read my comments, if this is your opening line.

> Fine [0][1][2][3]. Keep in mind this isn’t some “1+1=2” problem, and people have dedicated their lives to figuring this out, so if you’re looking for a “conclusion” then I don’t recommend human psychology.

The fact that none of these represent a counter argument, and some actually support my premise, supports the above, you either haven't read my comments at all, or you flavored them in your own mind to such a degree that they no longer represent anything I actually said.

I'll restate my point a final time in hopes you'll actually address it: *time is the most equitably distributed resource amongst poor youth. Is it universally so? No. Is it perfectly so? No.* Two of your four links talk about the parents' time (either time with their children or otherwise) and the last two talk about time for recess. I fail to see how either of these represent less time for high school students, the kind who take the SAT, to study for the SAT.

Had you provided links that showed that kids in poverty have less time to study than their rich counterparts by some non-trivial margin, that'd be relevant, but all of your links just point out other places in poor kids lives that they are disadvantaged (less parental supervision, less childhood vocabulary, less childhood free social time, etc.), which are all definitely problems, but I fail to see where college administrators can use those to inform admissions in any meaningfully objective way.

100% agree, and this was an experience I had as well coming from a single parent household with a high school dropout. I, thankfully, had a grandfather that had forgone college and regretted it. So, every chance he got, he reminded me to study, so my life wouldn't wind up as hard as his and my mother's. I wholeheartedly recognize that just knowing there was an attainable way out was a huge advantage over similarly poor kids. A lot of my friends and family pretty much self-selected themselves out before high school even began.