MIT suspending SAT/ACT requirement for next application cycle

Is 180 IQ the baseline of admission into schools like Harvard or MIT? No, its not. Apples and oranges.

Most biased comments about college admission always get hung up on one of two irrelevant qualities:

* illusory perceptions that childhood genius far outside even their selective populations somehow equate to real world adult performance

* a selection bias that schools must supremely optimize some precise quality during admissions that they don't nurture or measure

Instead of you just look at the data, remove all the emotional nonsense, and assign everybody a number with a set of performance metrics most of what people care about are things the schools care nothing about and ultimately don't matter.

As someone who grow up with very few opportunities, accelerated programs and standardized tests were far and away the single biggest reason I was able to go from growing up poor and without any connections to a top 10 school and then a great career in software. In turn, that's allowed me to support my family in everything from mentoring to financial support.

This is a heartbreaking example of how some people today take equality to mean taking everyone down rather than trying to bring everyone up. Or in other words, "they don't love the poor, they just hate the rich"

> If the kid's that smart then presumably they'll have a top GPA as well.

I definitely wouldn’t make that assumption.

> If they're lucky enough not to be in Texas, well, there's nothing wrong with state schools in any of the other several states, and furthermore there's no shame in going to a community college first if you have to.

Oh no doubt. I went to two public state universities and I believe my education was just as good as I’d find anywhere. Though there are differences (opportunities), the education is pretty good overall. But! That doesn’t tell the whole story. Many of the kids I went to school with in undergrad had taken classes like AP Physics, or AP Chemistry, or math beyond geometry. I didn’t. So I had to work much harder in some classes. I failed Calculus I twice before getting an A (maybe a B+? Don’t remember) and moving on with my life. For other students this could send them out of engineering, or maybe out of school altogether, and I’d argue it’s not really an intellect thing more so than it is not being on a level playing field to start with. This is an issue even at state schools. Maybe more so if they lack enough resources to cover tuition and room and board. People growing up in poverty (not that I did myself but much of my family did) think debt == bad or maybe they’re afraid to ask for help.

I guess that’s to say, I think it’s a problem in the entire system, all the way down to elementary school (Lebron James Family Foundation is doing a good job in my view of trying to address this).

My main issue with Ivy League schools is the perception and recruiting exclusivity. Wanna work at Goldman? Yale. Google? Harvard. Netflix? CMU. Etc.

Not a whole lot of tech recruiting going on at, say, Ohio University where I did my undergrad. Fuck those kids. Not in our recruiting footprint. Not one of our “target schools”. As if you need to go recruit at Duke to hire a BA?

In my personal life I do a lot of work to try and get more employers and recruiters down there and find ways to help. It’s tough sledding. Sometimes I wonder why I bother when it seems like so few others care.

I fantasize like damn if I had a ton of money or a huge grant there are so many things I’d love to try and do. It’s just too hard to quit my full time work. I’ll have to wait until I’m older and financially secure.

The published literature doesn't support your claims, but that's OK because you have private data which you find more palatable? This is a fun combination with your posture of

> If you disagree, you should provide a source.

If you mean there is more to the credential than the coursework, of course that's true. But the only possible value in the credential is scarcity; if everyone gets it, it ceases to have any value as a credential.

Or if you mean there's more to the experience of going to college than just the coursework, of course that's true as well. But if everyone went to MIT (or any other selective school), that experience would change too; all those people would not be getting the same experience that people going to MIT now are getting.

In short, it is not really possible for everyone to "go to MIT" (or any other selective school) in either of the above senses. So I was focusing on what is possible, namely, for everyone to have access to the same actual learning materials that MIT students have access to.

There is one other thing you could be referring to that the online materials can't give you, namely in person instruction and feedback. Personally, if I think back to the classes I took at MIT, I didn't learn anything significant in those ways; everything significant I learned, as far as the actual academic material was concerned, I learned from reading the course notes and textbooks and working the problem sets and taking the exams (and seeing what I got right and what I got wrong). And all those things are available to anyone who goes to the OCW site. I can't say for sure what other people's experiences are, but I think this quote from Gibbon is relevant:

"The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."