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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

#91

Post by ironSkillet »

janalsncm wrote: post #73
neonsunset wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with any standardized test is that it can be gamed with enough practice/resources that poor people are way less likely to be able to access. So it's not a cure-all, there are tradeoffs.

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

#92

Post by avgcorrection »

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.

More to the point: part of the benefit is to get into the wealthier classes yourself.

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

#94

Post by Aloha »

busterarm wrote: post #77
Aloha wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

what on earth does this anecdote have with my comments?

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

#95

Post by nebula8804 »

busterarm wrote: post #77
Aloha wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

This sounds like a perfect description of retail stock traders vs institutional.

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

#96

Post by jcranmer »

latency-guy2 wrote: post #82
vagabund wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. A lesson that generalizes well. Remember Occupy Wall Street, Piketty's tome, the Bernie primaries? It all feels like distant history now.

Only if you have been led to believe any of those things were popular. Occupy Wall Street had participants that counted at most 30,000 cumulatively across demonstrations in NY and surrounding areas. Impressive number? Not in my opinion. Admittedly, I have no idea what the hell 'Piketty's tome' is, so I won't talk about it, seems like its related to a few books that sold 1.5m copies, pretty successful, that's it from…

> Admittedly, I have no idea what the hell 'Piketty's tome' is,

Piketty is an economist who wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which is a book on economics and wealth inequality (essentially arguing that the rich are inevitably going to get richer absent government intervention).

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

#97

Post by yesenadam »

swarnie wrote: post #6
paulpauper wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think cancel culture is worse at lower ranking institutions. It's hard to think of any notable recent incidents at top universities. Could be wrong.

Depends how you want to define "cancel culture" I can think of a few notable examples from arguably the highest ranked university, Oxford.

Could you write them or link to them too? Thanks.

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

#98

Post by vba616 »

antegamisou wrote: post #41
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.

> 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.

By definition, almost nobody goes to "elite" colleges, so 99.999% don't know what this is like.

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

#99

Post by finitestateuni »

julienchastang wrote: post #69
voisin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always has been.

Not really. A couple of generations ago, you could attend a US state college and pay off the tuition by working summer jobs. Now, due to a long list of factors, colleges attempt to extract every nickel out of parents/students. I don't have the reference on my finger tips, but universities are employing AI algorithms to achieve this. In turn, parents have to hire consultants to get advice on bargaining the tuition pri…

I went to a cal state and paid 7k a year in tuition. 3 years later I am making around 300k TC at a FAANG. Everyone who graduated with me seems to be doing pretty well judging by LinkedIn.

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

#100

Post by l33t233372 »

janalsncm wrote: post #74
thesausageking wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> This suggests to me that the SAT isn’t hard enough then

That’s tricky. In a massive country with many incredible students, it seems to me that it’s going to be possible for the top .1% of students to do as well as is possible on any reasonable exam.

Do you disagree?

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