211–220 of 235 posts
This is a problem markets can fix. The only way you get into an elite school is you donate a lot of money, you were admitted for color, or you know how to play the game. None of these abilities are things businesses should value, and I'd rather take a top student from a top state school because they're competent at the right things.
Is 'play the game' = be a good student?
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> Then I discovered that that list accounted for a full 25% of EVERY incoming class. This is open knowledge. From the WSJ, https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-get-into-the-ivy-league-extr... : ``` Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated…
> Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research. Using just "white" is extremely misleading. Harvard undergraduates are already only 40% white [1],…
Hold up, is this saying that literally over half of the graduate students are Jewish?? Am I reading this right?
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Could you write them or link to them too? Thanks.
Removal of the Queen's portrait > Postgraduate students at Magdalen College have voted to remove a portrait of the monarch based on a photograph by Dorothy Wilding, taken in 1952, at the time she was crowned. > The portrait, purchased in 2013 by students to decorate the Middle Common Room (MCR), the room that houses them, has been removed because it was an unwelcoming symbol of the UK's "recent colonial history". Som…
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> 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. Not going to one of the "elite" schools is, though, and it's not like financial aid disappeared at all the state schools. The reputational difference between the…
>The reputational difference between the state schools and the ivy league has been narrowing a lot in recent years in response to numerous scandals like this and a lot of improvement from the state schools. The elite schools are considered "elite" not because they offer a better education, but because they ensure that your classmates will be valuable network contacts after you graduate. From the perspective of the sc…
This is how organizations die, political, corporate, non-profit, or any other type. People who are good at knowing other people frequently aren’t the best person for the job, and selecting for newcomers who are good at knowing other people over work leads to aristocrats and manipulative sociopaths taking over, and then you have GE, a company that lost its ability to innovate, could only copy hot trends popular among Wall Street poorly, moved into finance and oil despite having no expertise in these fields to the tune of billion dollar losses, and is now a mess in the process of being broken up and dissolved.
On a much greater scale, Putin’s Russia works a lot like this, which has led it to become an incompetent brutal dictatorship that terrorizes its citizens and also can’t even take over Ukraine, one of the poorest country in Europe and its direct neighbor, because everyone who was competent got pushed out or killed.
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> Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research. Using just "white" is extremely misleading. Harvard undergraduates are already only 40% white [1],…
> For graduate students it's even more ridiculous - 53% Jewish, 28% non-Jewish white. Hold up, is this saying that literally over half of the graduate students are Jewish?? Am I reading this right?
Perhaps we should ask for the diversity statistics to count Jewish numbers separately so we could have official numbers, but I suspect that might encounter some resistance :)
*For 2015, the Jerusalem Post actually estimates Jews at 25% of undergraduates, but that may be relying on some since-corrected overestimation by Hillel. See https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co... and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat...
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It’s an empirically sound assumption to make, especially when it comes to people who are products of wealthy lineage a few generations back and have barely worked. > It’s a lazy, unintelligent critique I think this is what a subset of people belonging to lower socioeconomic classes tell themselves, and sometimes have heard it from their “superiors”, to better cope with their financial struggle. The poor people are ju…
Your analysis is bad and your desire to judge others is worse. What percentage of millionaires inherited their wealth? Go Google it. Now tell me if it’s ok to judge any group of people based on that percentage.
It may be incomplete but your next sentence about inheritance is actually what's poor judgement on your part.
I didn't mention direct inheritance in my previous comment, however it's really hard to make any distinction between this and the fact that being born in the 'right' family means access to professional/educational opportunities due to specific connections almost never easily attainable by the ordinary mortals. And yes, this often means, especially in professional settings, getting away with doing the bare minimum and staying on the job just because the boss was in high school with your shipowner dad.
> What percentage of millionaires inherited their wealth?
This is a really problematic way to address the effect of inheritance has on one's wealth since such percentages are relied on self-reports, which means that effectively all will identify as self-made. I find it entertaining, but also telling about the brainwashing the financially desperate have suffered, people like Elon Musk being cited as self-made when they always happen to come from financially privileged families.
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…
It does not look to me the SAT study you linked to concludes what you claim it concludes. You are saying in 81% of the cases the SAT score is useless. They are saying this: When HSGPA (high school GPA) and SAT are combined, the correlation with FYGPA jumps to .61, an increase of .08 and a 15% boost in predictive utility over using HSGPA alone.
It's true, when you combine SAT with GPA, it's better, but that was not the point I was rebutting.
Even so, with GPA+SAT, if r = .61 then r^^2 = .37, meaning 63% of variation in college grades are not explained.
And I believe this is first year college GPA only - "getting a good GPA in freshman year" is probably a weaker argument than "succeding in college, or afterwards"
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 bal…
The point here is that 75% of 40% (= 30%) of the majority/white students received special help and would not have been admitted otherwise. Furthermore, much of that special help was directed because of wealth and donation power, not due to "need".
You raise a good statistical question ("ok, it's 30% of majority but what is the % for minority").
I do not have the data for that, and in a world where average income of various ethnicities was the same, that would be a compelling point.
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It does not look to me the SAT study you linked to concludes what you claim it concludes. You are saying in 81% of the cases the SAT score is useless. They are saying this: When HSGPA (high school GPA) and SAT are combined, the correlation with FYGPA jumps to .61, an increase of .08 and a 15% boost in predictive utility over using HSGPA alone.
I was replying to another comment which suggested using only standardized testing. It's true, when you combine SAT with GPA, it's better, but that was not the point I was rebutting. Even so, with GPA+SAT, if r = .61 then r^^2 = .37, meaning 63% of variation in college grades are not explained. And I believe this is first year college GPA only - "getting a good GPA in freshman year" is probably a weaker argument than…
Well, it's not redundant. And this study shows that.
Now you are saying that the SAT does not explain much of the freshmen year GPA. But that could be (and it probably is) a consequence of the fact that colleges have different standards. The SAT could have 100% prediction power, like the Oracle of Delphi, if the colleges have different standards the correlation between SAT and GPA will be low.
A second effect is at play here, the binning effect. If you have two variables X and Y that are highly correlated (let's say rho = 99%),and then you split the observations in bins based on X, then the correlation of X and Y for each can be very low. They could be arbitrarily close to zero. Just give it a try.
Finally, prediction power beyond the first year. Why would colleges need that? They need quantitative metrics to determine who would perform well once they come in. After that, it's their duty to educate and nurture those students. If they can't do that, and the final outcome is some form of lottery ticket, that's on them, not on the SAT.