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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

#141

Post by ameister14 »

true_religion wrote: post #134
ameister14 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the universities can completely do that, they can't get an antitrust exception while they do. That's the issue here, I think. The universities are colluding with one another as regards pricing and financial aid. This was allowed under an exception to antitrust law so long as financial aid played no role in admissions. The group is alleging that financial aid, or the lack of it, plays a role in admitting rich st…

I didn’t think universities were excepted from anti trust laws. Do you have any idea why this was permitted?

As I understand it they aren't entirely, but Section 568 of the Higher Education Act lets them communicate and act together for the purposes of determining some guidelines around financial aid.

https://www.naicu.edu/docLib/20150803_Antitrust_legislation....

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

#142

Post by csa »

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…

[dead]

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

#143

Post by fallingknife »

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…

> Multiple cash game hustlers have written about this phenomenon.

source please

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

#144

Post by xmddmx »

This is one of those complex topics which on HN, seesm to lead to "it's simple, do X" types of analyses, which tend to be simple, confident, and wrong.

Some facts to consider:

At Harvard, over 40% of non-minority students received special treatment for admissions (which includes factors such as being a legacy, athlete, or the 'dean's list' which was a list of high donating parents). 75% of those would not have been admitted w/o that help. I think this lawsuit is trying to pierce this veil. [1]

For those that argue "meritocracy" and that standardized testing is the answer: the SAT has a correlation of about r=0.3 to 0.5 with first year college GPA. Thus, the explained variance (r*2) is about 9% to 25%, meaning as much as 81% of college success is not statstically predicted by the SAT. [2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/17/harvar...

[2] https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/national-sat-val...

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

#145

Post by yterdy »

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.

I think it would work better with a slight twist: set a reasonable score floor, run a lottery for everyone above it. Instead of giving the world to people who(se parents have paid to) optimize their studies to a particular test, everyone who proves a certain degree of capability has a chance. Students simply do their best, and fate and the RNG takes care of the rest. If it becomes a problem, that we're underserving too many bright and promising youth because too few are getting into Ivies under this regime... maybe create more Ivy-likes (Stanford says hi).

And for anyone who thinks it's unfair: not anymore so than the parent lottery. And I think institutional acknowledgment of the role pure dumb luck plays in our lives would go a long way towards dispelling our inclination to actively punish people for acts of the cosmos and/or dysfunctional policy.

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

#146

Post by yterdy »

jedberg wrote: post #62
Telemakhos wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would different test-based or merit-based metrics radically change the result? After all, isn't the purpose of a holistic approach to college admissions basically to make the criterion not one of any measurement of quality merit, but of belonging to the right demographic mix that the college seeks to attain? Further, why should colleges try to correct for lack of opportunity? Their job is to educate people, and not e…

> Further, why should colleges try to correct for lack of opportunity? Public schools should do it because they are part of the education system that needs correction. Private schools arguably are still part of the public education system since they all get Federal dollars, and thus the same argument applies. If they're getting tax dollars, that makes them a public good, and therefore they should be doing things that…

Additionally, if we are to expect that much of our political, economic, and technical elite are to pass through these institutions - and, further, that such institutions will trade explicitly on their ability to produce this elite - then there is an inherent public interest in the character of their operations. It's simply a matter of accountability.

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

#147

Post by fallingknife »

l33t233372 wrote: post #100
janalsncm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Then you have tiered exams. e.g. if you score >1500 on the SAT, you can take the harder SAT-2 which would be used for admissions to top schools.

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

#148

Post by fsckboy »

busterarm wrote: post #88
moonchrome wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generalizing gambling anecdotes sounds like a huge leap.

Gambling shows you a person's true nature.

do you mean how each person gambles distinguishes each person's nature, or the fact of gambling puts you in the nature of being a gambler and says other things about your personality?

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

#149

Post by juve1996 »

fallingknife wrote: post #147
l33t233372 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Then you have tiered exams. e.g. if you score >1500 on the SAT, you can take the harder SAT-2 which would be used for admissions to top schools.

Diminishing returns, really. As you continually test the margins will get smaller and smaller and the outcomes won't change much. Someone scoring >1500 on the SAT will likely just as well graduate from ivy league as someone who scored 1550.

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

#150

Post by fsckboy »

xmddmx wrote: post #144

This is one of those complex topics which on HN, seesm to lead to "it's simple, do X" types of analyses, which tend to be simple, confident, and wrong. Some facts to consider: At Harvard, over 40% of non-minority students received special treatment for admissions (which includes factors such as being a legacy, athlete, or the 'dean's list' which was a list of high donating parents). 75% of those would not have been a…

> 75% of those would not have been admitted w/o that help

this not making a claim anywhere near as interesting as it pretends. Since you're using a %, what is the % difference in quality that admitting these 75% makes (assuming it's even true, considering I don't believe much from the Guardian) and how does that (what the author calls "affirmative action") compare with other affirmative actions taken to achieve a balanced class? were they otherwise 99% good enough, or only 10% good enough?

My money is on above 90% because I went to an elite school (that has no legacy) and lots of people there were extremely highly qualified, and the ones who weren't did not fall in a pattern of being wealthy or whatever, probably better explained by something like your evidence of how ineffective IQ (what SAT does correlate to) or high school grades are in predicting college GPA and how effective GPA is or isn't in predicting future contributions. I find grades have much more to do with psychological makeup, like do you rebel against authority, or knuckle under. Good grades are valuable, but don't tell the whole story of your value as a contributor, sometimes screwed up and crazy genius works better. But either way, shouldn't that be up to the school what combinations they wish to place their bets on?

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