481–490 of 815 posts
Admission for the children of faculty and staff (esp. if tuition is waived) is such an incredible benefit for the people that work at these institutions that I hope that is not also being abandoned. Legacies/big donors/alums sure, I don't care, but I'd hate to see university workers lose one of the best benefits they get.
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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...
Now, too many Asians are being admitted based on test scores. Oh no! To fix this problem, Harvard consulted their history department and included a “personality traits” section. Is it any wonder that Asian students scored low on this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
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But favoring legacy status in admissions is a form of racial discrimination because non-white people are much, much less likely to have legacy at elite institutions.
I don't think racial discrimination is the right term for discriminating based on things that happen to correlate with race. Everything correlates with race. Height, disease, money, eye color, divorce, number of pokemon cards, you name it. You may as well call it eye-color discrimination, height discrimination, pokemon card discrimination, etc, as well. It just makes no sense at that point. So what exactly is the poi…
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Doubtful. The only reason the cost of college is high is because 18 year olds that know nothing about finance don't have to pay for it now because they can get loans. You take away the loans, and you take away the ability of the college to charge whatever it wants and kids keep paying.
Are 18 year olds today significantly less smart than 18 year olds 50 years ago? No. So why is tuition so much more expensive? In 1970 tuition at University of California schools was about $1000, inflation adjusted. You could easily make that at a summer job. So what has changed? States have stopped funding for schools. A lot of tuition used to be covered by tax money, which spreads out the cost to everyone and over m…
Yes - but more importantly, schools got more expensive, because people had more access to debt.
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Now I feel like you’re making up strawmen. Literally no one is saying anything about legacy status counting against applicants. Even if that was a concern, applicants could simply… not mention their legacy status? Or better yet, the application itself could just not collect that data?
I'd hope it's not a strawman. I do think legacy admission status counts against now. The SFFA lawsuit accused Harvard of using legacy admissions of being a backdoor affirmative action for white people because the legacy admits were so disproportionately white. I think my point is that in a highly racial context, the facts are thrown out. To your point, in California, there was a law that was passed in 2019 that requi…
The California law you cite only applies to universities that collect and consider legacy data in the first place. Thus, your claim that “if a qualified legacy student is accepted, the data on students must be made public...” does not hold if the universities simply drop legacy status from consideration altogether, which is the goal here. If they don’t collect the data, they can’t be accused of anything.
Honestly, this manipulation of facts and narrative leads me to believe that you are pushing an agenda and not arguing in good faith.
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I don’t think it’s a stretch to say an Olympiad 4.0 student — many of whom exist, I went to school with a few — has a much more promising academic career than someone who managed to get good-not-great grades and a single perfect test score. Aside from the dedication of waking up to practice a sport every morning, think of how much time and discipline is it takes to balance being an amazing athlete with being a great…
What's the difference between training for track meets and training for a standardized test? In either case the student is applying themselves to excellence in a very niche skill - running really fast, or taking a test.
Edit: you’re acting like performance on the test is completely arbitrary. Clearly, it should be designed to avoid this, and to actually test academic mastery. For example, someone planning to study physics should be asked to solve difficult physics and math problems. Someone planning to study history or literature should be asked to write long-form essays on those topics. And so on.
I feel like a lot of people in this thread are only familiar with the American system and thus assume that “standardized tests” all have to be like the SAT, i.e. answering a ton of relatively basic multiple-choice questions as quickly and accurately as possible. That is not the case.
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I don't think racial discrimination is the right term for discriminating based on things that happen to correlate with race. Everything correlates with race. Height, disease, money, eye color, divorce, number of pokemon cards, you name it. You may as well call it eye-color discrimination, height discrimination, pokemon card discrimination, etc, as well. It just makes no sense at that point. So what exactly is the poi…
> I don't think racial discrimination is the right term for discriminating based on things that happen to correlate with race. Fortunately for people of color, it is. You don't have to say you're discriminating based on race in order to be doing so, and the law acknowledges this. That is how gerrymandered district maps can get struck down on the basis of racial discrimination. We do actually get to look at reality wh…
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This is definitely true, but we can go a step deeper. You have to think about what Harvard's goals are. Maximizing academic success is not very high on the list. The real goals are maximizing career success, donations, and cultural cachet/prestige. When legacies are considered with these goals in mind they make a lot of sense. Legacies are likely to have successful careers due to their parents resources and power, th…
Ok, then why have classes at all? Why have any tests? If college is just a country club for young adults, just auction off seats to the highest bidder and be done with it. You’ll get an elite mix of those with the most “potential”. It also has the benefit of full transparency. A seat at Harvard costs $4 million cash. Don’t have it? Too bad you wanted an education but Harvard has to look out for their own interests. W…
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SAT score floor + lottery?
What makes you think that is better?
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We do not live in a perfect world. Instead, we live in a world where a collection of individuals has had the fruits of their labor stolen from them for most of the past 400 years, served in wars where promises were made and not kept upon their return, and are still being discriminated against in representative democracy. And when someone enumerates all the reasons that these people have been harmed, financially, spir…
You might not agree with the spirit of this an endeavor, but I have a yes/no question for you: If you were to wear your most clever, most creative writing cap, could you make a convincing case entirely contrary to your beliefs? I'm not asking whether you could write a convincing case against racial affirmative action, because I know you could handle that just fine. Instead, could write a convincing case that the grou…
It's not an intellectual argument. It's an argument from performative and wanton ignorance.