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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

#661

Post by analog31 »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #285
julienchastang wrote: post #187

Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify. [0] The number of kids entering elite universities via non-meritocratic avenues is incredible. > "[The researchers] examined four kinds of nonracial preferences—for recruited athletes, and for children of Harvard graduates, financial donors and members of faculty and staff. The researchers found that more than 43% of…

It's kind of begging the question to assume multigenerational family ties to a university are "not merit" when a big part of a university's value proposition is social networking: One doesn't go to Harvard just to take courses; one goes to Harvard to bump shoulders with the scions of dictators / diplomats / "captains of industry" etc. Personally I didn't understand that at the time, would have rejected the notion on…

That could change, if there's no credible reason for society to support it. Democratizing education quality and access is inseparable from diminishing, or at least changing, the appeal of "elite" colleges.

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

#662

Post by theiwefrtifre »

julienchastang wrote: post #187

Good. With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify. [0] The number of kids entering elite universities via non-meritocratic avenues is incredible. > "[The researchers] examined four kinds of nonracial preferences—for recruited athletes, and for children of Harvard graduates, financial donors and members of faculty and staff. The researchers found that more than 43% of…

[flagged]

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

#663

Post by thelock85 »

importantbrian wrote: post #449
shadowgovt wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Better by what metric? Sometimes, by material. If the class can be taught from a textbook, the instructor may be irrelevant. The best classes at my alma mater were being taught by professors who handed out paperback copies of their as-yet-unpublished textbook, or had us work from the first-print editions they authored, or who's "textbook" was the aggregation of notes they'd collected over the years.

Your experience is wildly different than mine then. The worst professors I had were the ones teaching out of their own book.

Definitely one of the worst classes I experienced was Thermodynamics where I had to tip-toe around calling out gibberish in the 1st edition book authored by my professor. He was a real hard ass that would make you feel like the idiot for asking why the book and the whiteboard don't match.

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

#664

Post by sidlls »

tivert wrote: post #513
yannyu wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we might as well admit that "merit" is heavily influenced by starting conditions instead of pretending that everyone has "equal opportunity". How many times have I heard from people that the USA is about "equality of opportunity" and not "equality of outcome"? Legacy admissions is directly contrary to equality of opportunity, and undermines the idea of meritocracy in university admissions that people have been c…

> How many times have I heard from people that the USA is about "equality of opportunity" and not "equality of outcome"? Legacy admissions is directly contrary to equality of opportunity, and undermines the idea of meritocracy in university admissions... Understanding "equality of opportunity" to be literal and absolute is nonsense, because to do so would require hobbling people with natural talent (for instance), si…

I think you have it backwards: targeting "equality of outcome" necessitates policies to pick winners and losers. Specifically, it requires policies that aim to minimize both.

Equality of opportunity doesn't mean hobbling talented people or enforcing that everyone be given identical opportunities. It simply means that people regardless of talent (in a given ability) ought not be restricted from an attempting to take an advantage of an opportunity should they happen to have it.

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

#665

Post by motohagiography »

TrackerFF wrote: post #613
motohagiography wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People against athletic admissions have zero clue about what excellence requires and means. It's an attitude I can only describe as disgusting because it creates a prejudice against people who have actually worked at something and taken risks to succeed. It is equivalent to banning music scholarships. Who benefits from removing those who actually develop a physical competence and commit to training and competition?

Some of us come from parts of the world where these things simply do not exist. So it is a very, very foreign concept. So you're good at sports, or some instrument, or whatever. That's nice - but why should it give you an edge over other people when it comes to school admission?

What makes a western education so valuable is that it has produced the rounded character that enabled the culture. Athletics was and is education. In countries where there are no athletics, education is just rote indoctrination. Someone who has played a team sport is more equipped to lead - e.g. scale their capabilities - than someone who has not because it's about tacit knowledge and physical experience you can't just memorize. An athlete is necessarily more educated than a non-athlete, just by definition. The most dominant organizations in the world recruit from athletic programs for this reason.

Thanks to the replication crisis, statistically, probably half your professors were frauds anyway, especially if you went to a top tier school in the last decade or two, and almost none of them would have been athletes. They don't have the character required to succeed in a physical discipline, and they hate athletes because people from physical culture are difficult to bully and decieve.

Want to learn how to work on a team? Sail a boat with a crew. Want to learn to push boundaries and take risks? Race downhill on anything. Want to solve coordination problems? Play football/soccer. Want to appreciate nature? Surf. Want charisma? Ride a horse. Want to understand cumulative effort and long term strategic goals? Powerlift. Want to understand endurance? Run marathons or be a triathlete. Want to learn ego discipline and humility? Play tennis. Want to read people? Try fencing. Want to learn what performance really means? Do any of these at a serious level. Dismissing athleticism is just farcically ignorant and effete.

Maybe the argument against these is that they require class, but I know poor kids who have achieved at the highest levels of most of them, and they earned the class distinction and respect for their skill that comes with the competence. Merely learning to call things problematic and fall into line commands no respect from anyone, and it has created a layer of anxious impostors driving institutions into the ground.

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

#666

Post by rank0 »

alex_young wrote: post #660
rank0 wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median (not average) PPP income is highest in the US. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income While it’s true our income inequality is larger, the fact still remains that the median American makes more money than the median European (or any other comparable region). Ask yourself: Is it better for everyone to be richer and have high inequality? Or is it better for everyone to be poorer but more equal? EDIT:…

Let's look at France then. They have lower numbers on paper when you look at things like per capita GDP, but they live longer lives, work about half the hours we do, take a full month of vacation, have access to free higher education and healthcare, etc. The estimates for their overall wellbeing are very similar to ours [0]. At to income distribution - in France the lowest quintile controls 8% of incomes [1], while i…

There’s a lot of great things about the French economy. There’s also plenty of areas where they lag behind the US.

The French labor force participation rate is ~74% compared to ~62% in America.

The French homeless rate is 3x the US rate.

France just defaulted on its national pension obligations a few months ago.

What policy exactly should we copy from France? If we’re still arguing about wealth redistribution policies I want a clearly articulated example of a superior system. I don’t see where it is in France but please lmk if I’m missing something.

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

#667

Post by importantbrian »

thelock85 wrote: post #663
importantbrian wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience is wildly different than mine then. The worst professors I had were the ones teaching out of their own book.

Definitely one of the worst classes I experienced was Thermodynamics where I had to tip-toe around calling out gibberish in the 1st edition book authored by my professor. He was a real hard ass that would make you feel like the idiot for asking why the book and the whiteboard don't match.

I had this same experience. The professor would say just read the book. We would say but we did read it and we are confused. And he would say I don’t understand the issue it’s very clearly stated in the material.

In fairness I actually did have one good experience with this. I had a history professor assign some material he’d written about the civil war and both he and the material were fantastic. Ironically that was at the junior college. Professors become professors by publishing. I’m not sure why someone would think “wrote the course material” would be a feature unique to elite universities.

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

#668

Post by sangnoir »

sangnoir wrote: post #464
kulahan wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never really understood the complaint. Rich people spend massive amounts of money to send their kid to a school. That massive, completely unnecessary investment is then reinvested across the students attending the school, who come from all different backgrounds. This is, in effect, one of the most common ways wealth is redistributed in the US. Why is it so bad? Maybe we should limit it, but the actual practice itse…

The fundamental question is: do we want admissions based on merit (or not)? Saying "Yes" and then carving out an exception for the wealthy is dishonest (IMO); if the answer is "No, admission is not on merit" then we need to talk about what other considerations would be fair game. Also, implicit in your argument is that universities getting more money is always a good thing - I take umbrage at that prior as universiti…

Upon further reflection, I can see how it is advantageous to the elite if "wealth" and "merit" are seen as interchangeable terms by the public.

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

#669

Post by knelmatek »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #554
letrowekwel wrote: post #541

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 sch…

What do you put on the exam? Harvard isn't just looking for academic success. They're looking for the next generation of leaders. How do you test for that?

IQ is a pretty good proxy for that.

In France, admission to the best higher education institutions, like Ecole Polytechnique, is done through an anonymously-marked written exam with questions about math, physics, etc. Admission is entirely based on how you scored on that exam, with the top N scores guaranteed admission (and the ones below that have to expect some people above to decline for whatever reason, which in the case of Polytechnique is rare, unless they got into something equally prestigious like Ecole Normale Superieure).

This system has produced three Nobel recipients (Becquerel in physics, Tirole and Allais in economics), many famous mathematicians and physicists (Carnot, Cholesky, Chasles, Coriolis, Fresnel, Mandelbrot, Navier, Poisson, Poincare, Thevenin, Lagrange, etc.), three French Presidents (Giscard d'Estaing most recently), many military leaders, astronauts, CEOs, etc. and indeed also Hacker News posterboy Fabrice Bellard (and that's just for one school, Ecole Polytechnique).

It works.

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

#670

Post by jinjin2 »

rank0 wrote: post #649
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing absolute numbers for income is a bit of a fool's errands, even when you use PPP. The philosopher John Rawls has a famous thought experiment of choosing a form of social and economic organization without knowing where you personally might end up on whatever heirarchy it generates or contains. Rawls' point was that in such circumstances, most even semi-rational people will choose the one that makes it the mos…

I appreciate the response! > By contrast, social democratic societies in Europe have lower median (PPP) income, but higher income redistribution means that far fewer people face such struggles. The idea that EU citizens do not face poverty is simply false. The EU sheltered homelessness rate is very close to the US, both under 0.2% which is phenomenal honestly… Poverty rate statistics are quite tricky to decipher. But…

How about Denmark? Seems like a smooth running country. Hardly any national debt. Free healthcare and education for all. Consistently rated as one of the happiest countries on earth.
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