Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

chronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 307 posts

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#11

Post by pattusk »

j7ake wrote: post #4

There is discussion of these partial lotteries in academia as a way to improve the procedure of getting grant money. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

This is generally known as sortition and was common in the ancient world.

I've always felt it modern democratic politics would benefit greatly from such a system. I'm not sure the same is true of academia, you want students good enough that they do not risk failing at an elite institution, but when setting the threshold for "good enough" it's easy to reproduce the same inequalities you were trying to avoid in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#13

Post by ggm »

sunseb wrote: post #10

[flagged]

Selecting randomly from a cohort already judged good enough is a meritocracy. Perhaps you prefer the French model with a linear ranking nationwide and a cap on how many thousands down from the top can go to the ecole normale superieur?

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#14

Post by MagnumOpus »

rusty-rust wrote: post #7
kokooo wrote: post #3

College should be a meritocracy, it's just that we want people to be able to be able to afford it and not be shit out of luck if they can't go to it. This would also reduce stress as you don't have to worry about not getting into a college if you know your life is going to turn out fine either way. Why has this goal been malformed and twisted around to the point where people are coming up with any solution that doesn…

I think your argument is engaging in “what aboutism” and detracts from the issue this article is trying to address. The problem they are trying to address is that true meritocracy only exists in a perfect system, that is to say that you can not fairly compare individuals across different environments. More concretely one of the problems it is trying to account for the situations where wealth or post code privilege gi…

> There are often situations where students just performed better on a standardized test because they could afford a couch or had better teachers and not because they are “smarter” or more capable

The solution is to make sure that students have good teachers and a couch (??) to become more capable, and not to waste limited elite teaching resource on less-capable students.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#15

Post by SrslyJosh »

Let's take it further. Colleges should be government-funded, and their level of discretionary funding should be based on how they are rated by their students and an independent assessment of their students' skills and general knowledge (to be administered before and after attending).

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#16

Post by blackbear_ »

chii wrote: post #12

education is not a scarce goods - why not accept _all_ candidates that are good enough? The cost of educating one more student is marginal, and if there's a large enough number, economies of scale can kick in as well.

Works for a bachelor but fails for a PhD, where students need to have a much closer relationship with their professors.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#17

Post by gberger »

kokooo wrote: post #3

College should be a meritocracy, it's just that we want people to be able to be able to afford it and not be shit out of luck if they can't go to it. This would also reduce stress as you don't have to worry about not getting into a college if you know your life is going to turn out fine either way. Why has this goal been malformed and twisted around to the point where people are coming up with any solution that doesn…

I disagree that college should be a pure meritocracy. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds would have a really hard time getting into college, even though many are extremely smart and have great potential to succeed at college. Meritocracy is biased towards the privileged.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#19

Post by JumpCrisscross »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #15

Let's take it further. Colleges should be government-funded, and their level of discretionary funding should be based on how they are rated by their students and an independent assessment of their students' skills and general knowledge (to be administered before and after attending).

> government-funded...based on...an independent assessment of their students' skills and general knowledge

This would compress the wide spectrum of American college experiences into a single state-mandated standardised test-driven program.

Re: Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

#20

Post by Aerroon »

chii wrote: post #12

education is not a scarce goods - why not accept _all_ candidates that are good enough? The cost of educating one more student is marginal, and if there's a large enough number, economies of scale can kick in as well.

>education is not a scarce goods

Education itself is not, but going to a top college is not the same as getting an education. If Bryan Caplan's idea of college being mostly about signaling[0] is true, then top colleges can't scale. They are an exclusive club and a lot of the benefits of top colleges come from being exclusive. Opening it up to more people reduces these benefits for the students.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education...

Post reply on HN