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Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

reuters.com

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Re: Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

#71

Post by jonnybgood »

Telemakhos wrote: post #64
rfrey wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you would have universities exclusively populated by people who are good at taking whatever type of standardized test you're administering.

Are you suggesting that having people capable of scoring well on exams of common necessities for college education, like mathematics and language skills, is not desirable? The SAT is not a trivia test: a student who can pass a test on math up through precalculus is going to get more value out of college than one who does not understand algebra and has to spend time in remediation. I would much prefer to have a univer…

You didn’t address the comment you’re responding to. You won’t have students who are good at math and language skills. You’ll have students who are good at taking math and language skills standardized tests. Being good at math and being good at taking a math standardized test is two different things. A student can excel at math but be terrible at taking tests for many reasons. You’ll have bright students falling through the cracks if this was the only consideration for admission.

Re: Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

#72

Post by yunohn »

angmarsbane wrote: post #35

Isn’t part of the benefit of getting into these universities the fact that you get to interact with people from a wealthier economic class? You have the opportunity to meet people who can invest in your ventures or who can introduce you to people who can.

The main part is the status signaling. And using the value of the university degree for future wealth building.

Not hating, just observing.

Re: Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

#73

Post by janalsncm »

neonsunset wrote: post #54
jedberg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how University of California admissions used to work for the most part. The formula was: Weighted GPA * 1000 + SAT Score + SAT II English + SAT II Math + max(remaining SAT II scores) Then they ordered everyone by that number, and if say they were offering 5000 kids admission, the top 2500 would automatically get an offer letter. Then they would work their way down the list reading essays and adding bonuses for…

This was going so well until the pivot in the last two paragraphs. Is admitting the most capable students unfair? It is inherently discriminatory based on their knowledge and ability, which seems is what people want, but it also means that having more resources to be better equipped aka better nurture, which tends to positively influence individual's prospects, is suddenly something many are not okay with? Obviously,…

Ironically present-day Chinese college admissions are arguably far more meritocratic than American college admissions. The main factor is performance on the Gaokao exam, an 8 hour test which dwarfs the SAT’s 3 hours.

Re: Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

#74

Post by janalsncm »

thesausageking wrote: post #63
Telemakhos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine what would happen if colleges fired their admissions departments, set aside all considerations of wealth and race, and had a database admit students with a single query on a result of standardized test results ordered from highest score to lowest, accepting students in that order until the year's class was filled.

It would be a lot worse. Harvard could fill its classes 4x over with students with perfect SATs and GPAs. They would miss out on the ones who published ground breaking biology papers, wrote code for important open source projects, etc. It would also put a ton of pressure on high school students to get perfect scores, creating a ton more stress than they already have. And at the expense of much more valuable things th…

This suggests to me that the SAT isn’t hard enough then. That many students should not be able to get perfect scores.

The number of high school or undergrads who wrote groundbreaking biology papers is vanishingly small, but you do raise a good point. There’s a chicken and egg problem. Because schools aren’t just weighting test scores (because the score is flawed) there is incentive to work on other, more subjective things.

Re: Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

#75

Post by cm2187 »

Telemakhos wrote: post #30
Analemma_ wrote: post #17

To the people complaining about this: this is actually a very positive development that I welcome and you should too. This entire time, elite U.S. colleges have been carefully steering conversations about admissions in the direction of racial quotas, to avoid talking about how by far the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements. If you want to…

Imagine what would happen if colleges fired their admissions departments, set aside all considerations of wealth and race, and had a database admit students with a single query on a result of standardized test results ordered from highest score to lowest, accepting students in that order until the year's class was filled.

You are describing the French elitist educational system until maybe 15y ago. This counterintuitively resulted in very little diversity.

There might be natural reasons for that but there were also clearly some perverse effects: because those exams became effectively competitive exams (fixed number of seats available), they require intense preparation in preparatory schools which became the educational equivalent of a 2-3y navy seal bootcamp (it's not enough to have good grades, you need the best grades). Teachers in poor area high schools were often unfamiliar and intimidated by this system (they didn't go through it themselves), and were actively discouraging good students from taking that path. Students not having educated parents who knew the system were not pushed to work really hard to get into, and survive that system either. And you ended up with 80%-90% of the kids in those colleges coming from families from similar colleges. Money wouldn't be a major factor, the top colleges and preparatory schools are free.

Now the natural ratio shouldn't be 3-5% (elite college educated parent as % of general population), probably around 50-60%, certainly not 80-90%.

For the past 15y, France has opted to break the thermometer instead, ie to bypass those exams for the majority of the recruitment, and to select students on file which grants them full latitude for subjectivity. I suspect they also nationalised the selection process of those preparatory schools (not super familiar with the latest developments). I think the main consequence is that those elite colleges will quickly lose their prestige, and it might actually be the unstated intention, i.e. converge to a german like education system where the name and prestige of the university matters little vs the profile of the student.

It might be a good thing or perhaps it will just ruin the french educational system, it's hard to tell.

Re: Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

#76

Post by halostatue »

Telemakhos wrote: post #64
rfrey wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you would have universities exclusively populated by people who are good at taking whatever type of standardized test you're administering.

Are you suggesting that having people capable of scoring well on exams of common necessities for college education, like mathematics and language skills, is not desirable? The SAT is not a trivia test: a student who can pass a test on math up through precalculus is going to get more value out of college than one who does not understand algebra and has to spend time in remediation. I would much prefer to have a univer…

I took the SAT decades ago, so the predictive nature of the SAT may have changed since — but I doubt that it has changed that much.

At that time, the SAT was good at predicting the likely performance of a prospective college student … for one term. That’s it. I got an excellent score on my SAT (not a perfect score, but I thought that it was a bullshit measure — which, like all standardized testing, it is — so I didn’t care). I did well in my first term, and then not so well after that (I ended up doing fine in the end, but it took longer to get through a degree program because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up; I think that Americans, by and large, put too much focus on going to university too early and we would be better served by an extra year of high school and/or a gap year).

One other thing I remember from that time period is that a better predictor of overall success in school was NOBITH, the Number Of Bathrooms In The House. That is, socioeconomic indicators were a better predictor than anything else, including nonsense standardized tests like the SAT. And given that socioeconomic indicators are a better indicator, that is a strong indication that there’s seriously wasted potential at all levels of eduction because we mistakenly equate family socioeconomics with success in general.

Re: Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

#77

Post by busterarm »

Aloha wrote: post #66
antegamisou wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have the opportunity to meet people who can invest in your ventures. and who are also completely lacking empathy for the financially challenged at best, disregard and look down upon the less privileged at worst. Both may lead to social isolation of persons with different socioeconomic background attending said schools.

You can be middle class or upper middle class and have that viewpoint if you've had insufficient exposure to people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Try gambling (say, poker) with the ultra rich. They don't really give a shit win or lose because they like the entertainment, but they _absolutely hate_ to lose to someone who needs the money. For one, that money is never coming back to the table for them to win back later, and two, that person was playing for completely different stakes as the rest of the table and actually "got over" on them.

If you even want to get into such games, having the money isn't enough. You need the aura that it's small stakes to you. Multiple cash game hustlers have written about this phenomenon.

Re: Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

#78

Post by janalsncm »

jonnybgood wrote: post #71
Telemakhos wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that having people capable of scoring well on exams of common necessities for college education, like mathematics and language skills, is not desirable? The SAT is not a trivia test: a student who can pass a test on math up through precalculus is going to get more value out of college than one who does not understand algebra and has to spend time in remediation. I would much prefer to have a univer…

You didn’t address the comment you’re responding to. You won’t have students who are good at math and language skills. You’ll have students who are good at taking math and language skills standardized tests. Being good at math and being good at taking a math standardized test is two different things. A student can excel at math but be terrible at taking tests for many reasons. You’ll have bright students falling thro…

How do you know that this hypothetical student “excels” at math if their performance can’t be measured? Students can and are already given reasonable accommodations. Sure tests may be imperfect but I am highly skeptical of any claim that math test performance and academic math performance are not highly correlated.

Re: Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

#79

Post by Spivak »

graphe wrote: post #44

> The prospective class action filed last year against 17 schools alleged a price-fixing conspiracy in which schools restricted financial aid, causing a class of potentially more than 200,000 students to over-pay for tuition by tens of millions of dollars. The lawsuit survived an early bid by the schools to dismiss it. What does this mean? They didn't qualify for student aid, they qualifed and were denied, or they we…

One school cuts their financial aid program, sucks but not illegal. Every school cuts their financial aid program, smells like price fixing. Students would have chosen a school with a more attractive financial aid program, which is a real effect — it’s super common to apply a bunch of similar schools and go to the one that gives you the most financial aid but the allegation is that all the programs dried up all at once and not going to college at all pretty much isn’t an option for a lot of fields.

Without some kind of intervention that prevents employers using college degrees for employment decisions we’re gonna be here a while.

Re: Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek 'wealth favoritism' information

#80

Post by strikelaserclaw »

honeybadger1 wrote: post #4

It's always about money now.

i mean, if all the smart kids from poor, middle and upper middle classes (who are basically the powerhouses who create new research, build new companies etc...) stopped putting these universities on a pedestal, they wouldn't have much leg to stand on. As it stands, humans are basically pretty amoral, they only cry if they are disadvantaged, and they forget all about unfairness if they become the lottery winners.
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