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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

#541

Post by letrowekwel »

Admissions are easy to do right. Just give anyone with a valid educational background (like college/high school completed) a chance to participate in a strictly observed live exam, which is then graded anonymously. 100% fair, leaves no place for discrimination. This is how many countries do it in Europe and it just works.

But what about economically disadvantaged minority groups? That's easy to fix too. Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of opportunities.

Of course all this requires money, which the 1% isn't willing to give. But from anyone else's perspective it's plain stupid that the system first fails to give people of poorer background proper education, and then tries to fix this by discriminating based on ethnicity, which only partially correlates with poverty and bad schooling.

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

#542

Post by OkayPhysicist »

vkou wrote: post #506
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boils down to this: If you have some fraction of your students who get in, not on their primary merits as students, but for some other reason that benefits the rest of the student body in some way, eliminating that fraction of the students benefits a handful of students who were at the very top of the waitlist to get in, at the cost of the benefits those preferentially selected students provided. In both athletics…

I can make the same argument for AA. A diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, including students who managed to overcome a lot more adversity than the average rich kid, or white-collar family admittee will make for a better, richer learning experience for everyone.

As well you should.

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

#543

Post by importantbrian »

melagonster wrote: post #528
toast0 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more importantly, can fund top class research that costs ALOT of money. That's important if you're at the college to do research; but many people attend college to get instruction. Top class research says nothing about top class instruction.

but some people try to find top class instruction of research. what's can better than hiring best researchers, give them foundation for research and require they teaching students how to research in same time?

The University of Kansas is an AAU school and has an acceptance rate of 92%. Most R1s are big state schools who admit almost everyone who applies. You do not need to go to an Ivy League schools to get top notch research instruction.

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

#544

Post by thebooktocome »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #523
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sins of the father isn't a popular position in this country. It's also a very hard way to get elected.

The popularity of the sentiment seems to depend crucially on who precisely the father is, and what the sins were.

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

#545

Post by jpadkins »

nradov wrote: post #101
lisper wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Everyone understands that standardized tests are biased. They are still the least bad way to identify students from underprivileged backgrounds who have high potential to succeed in college.

I am someone, and I don't understand why they are. Do you have a primer handy on this subject?

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

#546

Post by efficax »

stainablesteel wrote: post #481
efficax wrote: post #423

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.

i'm ok with this seeing as professors don't exactly make a lot of money, or if they do its because they dedicate 120% of their time doing so

Right? my wife is tenured at a big college and I make more than double her salary as an SWE. we're not going to have children so the benefit doesn't apply to us but i've seen it used to, for example, get a janitors kids into a college they would normally never afford (jesuit colleges offer this for staff across a network of other jesuit colleges, so for example you could be at loyola and your kids could go to fordham so long as they meet some academic requirements)

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

#547

Post by rank0 »

kweingar wrote: post #284

Ultimately the existence of elite universities is the root of the problem. Most colleges take a huge majority of the students who apply, so neither legacy students nor affirmative action make too much a difference for them. Universities should be more like this and less like incubators for the ruling class. All of the drama recently revolves around wealthy students being denied their rubber stamps or underprivileged…

Is your argument that we should not have elite universities in the US? Seriously?

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

#548

Post by elteto »

mlyle wrote: post #19
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.

At the same time, we're getting rid of testing in admissions decisions. So instead we're in an era of squishy, difficult-to-judge metrics... and of course, the places where one could stand out-- interesting stories on one's transcript or essay-- are increasingly being evaluated by AI.

It's because schools want to retain a measure of control over who they let in. A true merit based admissions system (say min SAT score + lottery after that) is uncheatable and therefore schools have _zero_ control on who they have to accept.

The only reason why Harvard has kept its mythos of being the incubator of the next ruling class is because, well, they accept the children of the current one. Those are most likely to become part of the next ruling class by virtue of having been born into it. It's an old boys club. There's no intrinsic property of Harvard that turns them into this incubator.

And from the other side you have the brain dead equity idiots who are also against true merit systems, for equally twisted, but different reasons.

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

#549

Post by tivert »

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

That is not good. China has that, and I would not consider the culture it fosters healthy at all. What you then get is kids who literally have no life beyond studying for the test and the results of one point on the exam having a massive effect on ranking and therefore outcome.

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

#550

Post by kelnos »

saghm wrote: post #535
oatmeal1 wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the government could simply tax those with wealth more and use taxation as a means of redistribution. I don't think the word "simply" applies when you are suggesting the government take money from billionaires with their armies of lobbyists and redistribute the money to the masses.

So because billionares will try to fight legislation to keep them from trying to make things more equal, instead we should have them just voluntarily give their money to universities, as if that somehow isn't even more susceptible to being spent the way they want rather than to make things more equal? I admit I'm biased in favor of using taxes instead of university donations to redistribute wealth, but even for a pos…

Using taxes would be (IMO) ideal, but that just isn't politically feasible in the US. I'm not sure I'm convinced that university donations from the wealthy is anywhere near as good when it comes to wealth distribution, but it's pointless to say "doing this with taxes is better" if we don't have those taxes and can't have those taxes.

> So because billionares will try to fight legislation

They don't "try". They succeed. Time and time again. Maybe at some point they'll stop succeeding, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

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