771–780 of 815 posts
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When your history ensures that some groups are socioeconomically disadvantaged, every possible method will be biased. It's unavoidable.
So why don't we focus on socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals instead of focusing on racial metrics?
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> The more prestigious schools have more budget to hire better professors Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that instructional quality is in any way correlated with budget or prestige. > Your random college probably can't afford a research nuclear reactor, but MIT sure as hell can if they want. Idaho State has a research reactor. As does Kansas State, Missouri S&T, NC State, Ohio State, Oregon Stat…
> Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that instructional quality is in any way correlated with budget or prestige. I can't explain why you haven't seen it, but it's quite prevalent due to the economy of educational resources. Let's dispense with qualitative arguments and just talk about availability. For example, try to find a class for learning Farsi/Persian in Fullerton, CA. Community colleges don'…
When I was in grad school I missed out on taking a course I really wanted to take because it was offered by 1 professor 1 semester every other year, and I'm fairly confident he taught no other courses. Which is really common at elite universities. If you want to learn a specific subject like that with a truly limited number of professors the best thing to do is target a specific program. But you very rarely need to go to an elite school to get it. If you want to maximize your chances to be able to take whatever course you want you're actually much better going to a massive state school with 10k faculty than an elite school with 1-2k faculty many of whom rarely if ever teach undergrads.
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I'm not advancing that argument at all, but rather arguing "even people who do believe that will surely agree that the USA will someday cease to exist and, later, will fall out of history to an extent that someone will have to ask who/what the USA even was and, therefore, the notion that we will forever need affirmative action because '[the USA had] an actual legacy of the extraction, relocation, and enslavement of a…
I see. We're misunderstanding each other. A society with severe imbalances in wealth, health, and power should examine how those imbalances came about. If it turns out that they're directly caused by racism, that society should consider race-conscious remedies. This is true regardless of how long the racist policies have been perpetuated, and it's true regardless of whether or not the federal government of the USA st…
My only disagreement was with the conclusion that such remedies should be ordained at this moment to be "always be a topic deserving of special dispensation" since always is a very/infinitely long time.
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Bingo. At this point, you can acquire a better education on most topics through self-directed free routes like that as long as you're motivated. Or for some areas there are things like bootcamps, the best of which teach the actually marketable skills much better than colleges. I'd argue that college ceased being primarily about education a long time ago. College in my humble opinion is: • Place to rub shoulders with…
That's fine and all, but self directed education is a skill in itself in that you need to be able to figure out how to teach oneself and troubleshoot when you're stuck in addition to cultivating a mindset and habits. This is a thing not taught broadly to people, or otherwise well known. It is an entire topic in itself that people write entire books about it. For sure, there are ton of folks who self taught themselves…
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> wealthy but they won’t be elite. They’ll be the guy working a mid level job (or none at all) I think a super rich kid who can't quite get into say, Harvard, but instead goes to some other school, is not going to be unemployed or pushing paper in middle management, they're still going to work for the family firm, start a business with family money, or cross-pollinate among the other elite families. Furthermore, if t…
But I think there's no way this will result in reshaping of class in our society to where the elites are usurped by a bunch of smart, diverse (merit-admitted) kids from the wrong side of the tracks. I don’t see why not. America has a long track record of up from nothing elites. > Lloyd Craig Blankfein was born in The Bronx borough of New York City to a low-income, Jewish family on September 20, 1954. His father, Seym…
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I am someone, and I don't understand why they are. Do you have a primer handy on this subject?
SAT scores are correlated with wealth. This CNBC article is a decent introduction to the issue, but be aware that anything you read on the subject is likely to be pushing a particular narrative so it's tough to find a neutral primer anywhere. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/rich-students-get-better-sat...
I would think there would be a lot of demand for an unbiased standardized test. All I saw for suggestions was to use GPA instead, which clearly has a lot of bias potential... is there a recommended replacement for the SAT/ACT?
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What is your argument for why this practice should be allowed? It’s a public school, why should your family has an advantage because you went there? Is the goal of public school to maintain a club or provide access to education? If the latter, I don’t see how any kind of exclusivity other than merit makes sense.
My argument is that the university is free to conduct admissions as it sees fit within the bounds of the law. A preference for family members of alums is totally legal. Are you suggesting that the federal government should dictate admission procedures?
Hell yeah, the government should have a say in how publicly funded schools run their admissions. Why should a school running on public funds get to favour students differently based on who they are related to? Do they have a greater right to that public money?
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When someone in the future inevitably asks "what was the United States of America?", it will be long past time...
I mean, sure, but we’re not even close to there so I’m not sure why it’s relevant right now .
You design one for its ever-lasting nature.
You design the other to achieve a specific outcome.
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I'm not sure I buy this because the only metric I have seen on racial categories at Harvard is using the old score where the average Asian SAT score was 767 out of 800[1]. Apparently roughly doubling this is equal to the score format reported in the link above for legacies so rounding up and using this chart I found which may or may not be reliable https://www.sparkadmissions.com/blog/comparing-your-new-sat-... that…
The 50-100 (really 140-450 points) is from Princeton study on Asian SAT stats for admission in private colleges vs other races. Apologies for wall of text. Alternate explanation is that particularly sneaky elite admissions boards have learned to coordinate to devalue SAT scores for Asians, they'd rather engineer their mean Asian SAT score around something not embarrassingly high as cover for other cohorts, especially…
Of course, I don't think SAT score alone should determine entrance and no school has said that was all that mattered for admissions and I think that could be valid because the test score is really just one metric and doesn't give a complete picture. For example is the person a good test taker but a lazy student? That would reflect poorly on the student.
Also for the record and to be clear the legacy score of 1523 is still a high score and less than 1 std dev away from a perfect 1600 so it's not like we're talking about legacies who are totally out of range of admissions.
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I mean, sure, but we’re not even close to there so I’m not sure why it’s relevant right now .
Because a policy that is intended to last over 10K years, regardless of changes in situation is likely to be different than a policy that is designed to last until some level of change in situation has been acheived. You design one for its ever-lasting nature. You design the other to achieve a specific outcome.
Reminder that even the oldest of official policies in the US are just over 300 years old. Two magnitudes less. Most policies currently in use are less than a hundred years old and are a result of changes and amendments to those that proceeded them.
Even common law is only a thousand years old and has been revised over time.
None of that has anything to do with the issue still being relevant now and for the foreseeable future, ie the colloquial definition of “always”. When that eventually changes, then it can be re-evaluated, but that’s not likely to happen within our lifetimes, so it should very much be remembered when policies are made.