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Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

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Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#171

Post by thebradbain »

ecshafer wrote: post #152
thebradbain wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for, you know, Letters of Recommendation, which at top schools are often the deciding factor. All else being near-equal (or not), a letter from a Kennedy is going to get you into Brown versus say, a regular high school teacher that many of comfortable-but-not-connected suburban students applying to college will be using. Maybe a local lawyer, if you’re special. Those are who families who scream “meritocracy” s…

I want to get rid of letters of recommendation as well. I would personally like to go off of only a single nationwide standardized test.

I personally could not think of a more boring way to curate a student body, but even more so than that, I think that’s completely unfair to the many, many way-more interesting people who make up top schools’ student bodies: why does Jimmy Also-Ran with the perfect score on a single test and nothing else get to go to college while track-star Olympiad with a 4.0 doesn’t?

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#172

Post by indymike »

noobermin wrote: post #37
nancyhn wrote: post #4

The end of both legacy admissions and race-based admissions makes me feel hopeful that we're finally pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach.

I fundamentally do not understand why merit is something you should focus on when it comes to admission into a university. The entire point of an education is to learn, may be you need the bare minimum to enroll but universities shouldn't be chasing the brightest students, they need an education the least. Just because thats how it should work in some people's heads as the ideal doesn't mean it makes any actual sense…

> Meritocracy makes sense after you have an education, it doesn't make sense before it.

This is really a truth. There really is no meritocracy if you gate who is allowed to have merit before you measure it. Regulating opportunity to control outcomes is the exact opposite of what should be done to have a true meritocracy.

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#173

Post by Apocryphon »

thebradbain wrote: post #115
nancyhn wrote: post #4

The end of both legacy admissions and race-based admissions makes me feel hopeful that we're finally pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach.

Except for, you know, Letters of Recommendation, which at top schools are often the deciding factor. All else being near-equal (or not), a letter from a Kennedy is going to get you into Brown versus say, a regular high school teacher that many of comfortable-but-not-connected suburban students applying to college will be using. Maybe a local lawyer, if you’re special. Those are who families who scream “meritocracy” s…

Not to detract from your larger point, but these days, it might depend on the Kennedy.

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#174

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #130
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that the end of legacy and race-based admissions is a good thing. I think it's dangerous to think that a meritocracy always leads to good outcomes when there is huge inequality. This best analogy I can give is the "sports stars" analogy. Professional sports is probably the most even playing field I can imagine - there is such a huge incentive to win games that pretty much all else besides skills on t…

Why are the reward ratios in professional sports relevant to other occupations in society? > But what it results in is a teeny tiny elite making millions, and nearly everyone else barely making enough to get by. That is because a very small number of people can satiate the demand for almost all of the world’s people for entertainment from watching sports. Simple supply and demand. It has nothing to do with meritocrac…

> Why are the reward ratios in professional sports relevant to other occupations in society?

My whole point is that the hollowing out of the middle class and the huge growth in objective measures of inequality in the US are precisely because many other occupations are looking more and more like "sports star" economies.

E.g. just look at how the former "main streets" of many smaller towns in the US have been decimated. There used to be "local leaders" in retail in cities all over the US, now it's extremely difficult to compete if you don't have the scale of Amazon. Just look at all the recent stories about fears of AI taking jobs. E.g. it used to be that lots of people could get copywriting jobs. Now it looks like in a pretty short time frame that only the very, very best copywriters will be employable as so much other work is delegated to AI. Look at how most smaller news outlets have completely disappeared across the country. These smaller news outlets used to be fairly important factors in their community, but now they simply can't compete with the Internet giants for ad dollars.

I can go on and on, but the "winner take all" dynamic of sports economics has been spreading to pretty much any occupation that faces competition over the Internet.

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#175

Post by laverya »

lisper wrote: post #76
boeingUH60 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s as if you’re trying to make perfect the enemy of good. Standardized tests aren’t perfect but they give less privileged kids the best choice at attending a good college. The kids of the upper class and the rich will always have an upper hand compared to the poor. However, standardized tests limit how wide the upper hand is. An upper class kid still has to study and pass the test, and the poor kid can also do that…

I think you are underestimating the extent to which standardized tests can be (and have been) biased. https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racis...

Is there literally any test in which:

"Students of Color" receive scores in the same distribution as white/asian/hispanic students (same fraction of 1s, 2s ... 35s, 36s on the ACTs for example)

AND

Top scores are meaningfully distinct from the population average? (because the first condition can be trivially fulfilled by having everyone score the same)

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#176

Post by ghaff »

enkid wrote: post #151
ahi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large alumni donations can and often do increase the cost of education of all the other students. They frequently lead to large capital investments that then have uncovered operational costs. I used to work for one of the wealthiest universities with 100s of millions in capital improvements annually that couldn't provide functional HVAC and a fresh coat of paint to the buildings it had.

People don't want to donate to fixing something old, they want to donate to making something new, even when fixing something old is way more effective.

Nothing like how private companies like Google operate. /s

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#177

Post by [deleted] »

CSMastermind wrote: post #16

Don't legacy admissions often mean that their parents have donated significantly to the University? In a sense wouldn't that just mean that those students are essentially paying a very high premium to attend there and subsidizing the education of all the other students? I'm not against abolishing them but I do wonder if this will have any impact on alumni donations.

[deleted]

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#178

Post by rcme »

lisper wrote: post #32
nancyhn wrote: post #4

The end of both legacy admissions and race-based admissions makes me feel hopeful that we're finally pivoting to a productive, merit-based approach.

I hate to burst your bubble but unfortunately this just kicks the can down the road. How do you measure merit? Because [EDIT] many measures of "merit" (was: standardized testing) can be (and often are) biased by race, cultural background, and economic status. For example: Student 1 has built a fully automated chip manufacturing line in his basement. Student 2 has build a robot that solves a maze in fifteen minutes (a…

I hate these types of arguments that create an extremely contrived example. If we’re making a choice between these two students, then you can’t really go wrong. But that’s not the choice being made.

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#179

Post by screye »

Legacy admissions should not be legal in public universities. Massive public schools like UMass, Mich, StonyBrook, GATech, Minnesota, Penn State still take legacy admissions.

It's nice to see CMU follow in the footsteps of other top private tech schools like MIT & Caltech that claim to not use legacy status. It's no surprise that Ivies, Stanford and most private colleges all heavily favor legacy. Afterall, a large part of a prestige university's job is lend an appearance of competence to the not-as-competent kids of the elite.

source I used - https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/colleges-that-c...

Re: Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

#180

Post by hot_gril »

ecshafer wrote: post #169
gizmo wrote: post #109

I recently came across a somewhat provocative defense of legacy admissions. The argument is that the iveys are great because they bring together the children of the rich and powerful (legacy admissions with connections) with really smart and hungry students (children of the middle class, mostly). It's arguably a good deal for both. Smart kids get access to wealth and power and they get to learn how the world works. T…

I doubt that the mixture of rich and smart kids actually happens that much. I didn’t go to an ivy, so I can only speculate. But I imagine the rich kids hang out with each other and the poor smart kids hang out with each other.

Not an Ivy, but at Stanford, they seem to mix.
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