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

Why don't you teach me? How are SAT scores distributed, that raising the mean by 175, from 966 to 1141, does not change the area above the Ivy League admission cutoff, but raising it by another 75 points to 1216, increases that area by a factor of 6.6x?

Certainly not by the normal normal distribution - unless there were truly dramatic differences in the standard deviation. Do you have any evidence that there are, and are in the correct direction for your argument?

Or you could look at e.g. Harvard's own documents and see that they required higher SAT scores for whites, and highest for Asians [1]. Of course they do not count Jews separately in those figures.

[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/widget/2018/10/21/sat-by-race-gra...

> when the working conditions and compensation are such that staffing education at all is a massive struggle, let alone being selective

Of course. And that needs to change. Right?

However, this should not be a freebie. Pay more? Absolutely. And, with that, comes a require for excellence and performance that should be no different from any job where, if you don't perform, you are out looking for work elsewhere.

> I'm a STEM teacher who teaches the "T" without much technology at all

This is crazy. I am not sure how to put it other than, with the money we spend our public schools should be so good that private schools --not just in the US, world-wide-- should use them as a tough-to-follow metric.

I have tried very hard in our own school district to help up the level of STEM education in a range of ways.

My first attempt was with one of the local elementary schools. I offered to fully fund and conduct a model airplane STEM program for up to 100 students (about three classrooms). I would provide airplane kits to build and, for the more advanced class, also the radio control equipment. I met with the Principal to discuss. A couple of meetings later the county and school district got involved. The only way I can described what happened is "dystopian". Rather than jump on the opportunity to provide our kids with something like this, the reaction and interaction was in a range between being ghosted and feeling like I was the enemy at the gates. Truly incomprehensible.

My next attempt, years later, was to introduce a robotics class as at four local schools (two elementary, one middle and one high school). I scheduled and met with all four Principals from these schools. I brought with me a short presentation as well as a small inexpensive robot made from 3D printed parts and RC servos with an Arduino for control.

Once again, I volunteered to fund the entire thing at all four schools. Well received. Good conversation. One of the Principals took lead and proposed to organize a meeting with the science and math teachers from all four schools. This felt like progress.

What happened next?

I was ghosted. Seriously. And my kids attended two of these schools at that time.

The meeting never happened. Emails and calls were never returned. Nothing. Once again, I eventually dropped the matter.

Fast forward to just about a month ago. I offered the local high school's Physics teacher to come in every so often to help with anything she needed. I could bring interesting STEM show-and-tell items from my work in aerospace, robotics and more. She was kind enough to thank me for the offer. Since then, silence. I asked one more time. Nothing. One of my kids is in her class. I spend more time teaching my kid the Physics she is not teaching than she probably does actually teaching the kids in class. It's crazy.

We have a bad teacher problem. We have a bad schools problem. Until the system is morphed into one where excellent teachers and excellent schools survive and bad ones do not, we are not going to improve outcomes. And, yes, of course, this affects lower socioeconomic sectors far more than others.

The odd thing is that we already spend more per student than most nations of the world. Our return on that investment are high school graduates who are only good for stacking boxes in a warehouse and barely good to work at the local coffee shop. Being that about 60% of kids go from high school to college, that means 40% of adults leaving high school have no marketable skills whatsoever.

From there you have to look at what portion of that 60% actually finish college with what I will call a useful degree and how many drop out. A useful degree adds enough value to have better than minimum wage employment. There are lots of degree programs out there that are a straight path to minimum wage + no real marketable skills + lifetime college debt. Those who drop out are back to having no marketable skills due to the failure of our K-12 education.

The data [0] (interesting site) seems to show that only about 30% of the 60% who go to college actually graduate. Once again, that is terrible. No useful skills from high school and the vast majority of our college-bound students don't or can't graduate.

This is not an example of a school system designed to lift people out of their station in life. Quite to the contrary. It is an expensive mess with bad outcomes everywhere.

I could go on. STEM education is a topic I am obviously passionate about. I can't say I have not tried to make things better. I can only hit my head against a brick wall for so long. At some point all I could do is revert inward to devote my time, attention and resources to my own kids. They are doing great. They are far more advanced in STEM than any of their peers. I was willing to devote a nontrivial amount of time to help hundreds of kids in this region. The system expelled me, rather than those who are likely actively causing damage to our kids. That's sad.

[0] http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?submeasure=24...

So what then about the American system resists improvement? Why is it that, despite reform after reform after reform, the needle doesn't move?

But the president and provost are Jewish as have been several past ones. We're essentially arguing about which tiny elite has more power and influence, a corollary to being a Harvard alumnus. As others have pointed out, by parity it seems there would be more Jews than actual WASPs there in the student body presently. Over half of the whites may be Jewish and it's unlikely the rest are exclusively WASPs but we don't have exact granularity on this.

I think the WASPs fell from power decades ago. It's almost inexcusable that they could have any power in a hyper race conscious society. I think they are kind of viewed as an archvillain in this country in some sense. As a result, I don't think the WASPs are still in control there. I think the sensibilities you mentioned to get in are not WASPy, but reflect the new elite.

“The SAT score does not reflect your future possible success in college,” she said. “If you want it, you can do it.”

Amen. I loosely put GPA in my "portfolio/body of work" mentally.