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Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

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Re: Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

#81

Post by cascom »

agent008t wrote: post #67
subjectHarold wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the same university that admits more from eight private schools than from 3/4 of the state school system? Yep, sounds like a fair system. Cool story bro.

I doubt this is because of a biased admissions process. It could be a variety of factors: 1. Differences in encouragement from parents, teachers etc. Differences in how much emphasis is put on education. 2. Related to #1 - state school kids may think they are not good enough and not apply. 3. Actual quality of education may be significantly better at those schools, especially in certain subjects. 4. Genetic potential…

I know many US universities correlate the admitted student high scool GPAs and high school attended with how they performed at university, and then use that to handicap new applicants. i.e. Candidates from Public School A with a 4.0 GPA tend to graduate with a 2.9 GPA whereas candidates from Private School B with a 3.0 GPA tend to graduate with a 3.3 GPA

Re: Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

#82

Post by trowawee »

agent008t wrote: post #79
Someone1234 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a future Feynman really do enough extra curricular that have nothing to do with their area of expertise to even get into a school like Harvard? Likely not... If anything a lottery would increase their chances compared to the status quo. Harvard and similar schools have moved beyond just being smart. Everyone who applies is super smart. Now the yard stick is smart++ (meaning they want you to be "well rounded" wh…

Do they actually care about extra curriculars though? Cannot remember of a single case in Oxford CS admissions where that was a factor, let alone a deciding factor. Usually those with loads of extra curriculars were not as good as those for whom maths/CS was their true passion. They would look like they had received better admissions interview coaching perhaps, but it was our job to see through that and it was not th…

Not trying to be unkind here, but you keep bringing up examples from Oxford in a discussion about the American higher education system. There's a big difference in culture between the two, and so discussing Oxford as a counterpoint doesn't really make sense. It's not an American outlier, it's a totally different system with its own issues and culture that don't have much to do with this conversation.

And yes, schools in the US do care, deeply, about extracurriculars. Harvard could fill every seat, every year, with the valedictorian of a different high school class. Since nearly every data point is tightly grouped on the most immediately available metric, they turn to other data points to make their decisions. (And there's a long history of using that flexibility for both exclusionary and inclusionary purposes.)

Re: Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

#83

Post by sly010 »

dannykwells wrote: post #28
throwawaymath wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that a lottery without a qualification threshold would contradict meritocracy. In contrast, I don't think a threshold-based lottery contradicts meritocracy. Rather it can be interpreted as a claim that meritocracy cannot be properly quantified beyond a certain precision (which in this case is the threshold). Even if you disagree with that premise, it's substantially different than the rejection of meritocracy…

I think the point is too subtle to be broadly appreciated. Any crack in the dam of meritocracy is likely to become a flood. The illusion must be preserved. wrt to point 2: I guess it's about perspective. It's fine to propose systems that in theory would be nice but without an eye towards what could actually work, what's the point?

A good example of the crack/flood analogy is the current H1B visa system. You do have to be qualified to apply, but if enough people qualify a year, they distribute the spots randomly. Eventually the general public started referring to it as "H1B lottery" and assume it's all a matter of luck.

Re: Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

#84

Post by trowawee »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #65

I've said this before and I've said it again - I'm genuinely not sure about why we invest so much mental anguish about discussing $ELITE_SCHOOL's admissions process at all . If we're talking about opportunity, shouldn't we instead aim to provide opportunity for the 99.9% of people that either can't (me), or didn't go to the same handful of elite universities?

Well, the cynical answer is that the elite schools churn out the people who go into the media, government, and various other halls of power, so a lot of the chatter is actual graduates of these schools discussing their own alma maters, and they've essentially worn down the rest of us into caring. But a slightly less cynical take is that this stuff all trickles down through the rest of the higher education system, because of the aforementioned dispersal of elite university grads into positions of power, so fixing the culture at those elite schools would probably result in positive changes in the institutions they influence.

Re: Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

#85

Post by babyslothzoo »

trowawee wrote: post #64
babyslothzoo wrote: post #55

Would it be a problem to remove all identity categories (name/legacy/gender/ethnicity/origin/etc) of applicants and simply admit the most qualified students?

"simply admit the most qualified students" is the "assume a spherical cow" of the college admissions discussion.

Why?

Is this not supposed to be an elite university for elite students?

Re: Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

#86

Post by subjectHarold »

agent008t wrote: post #67
subjectHarold wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the same university that admits more from eight private schools than from 3/4 of the state school system? Yep, sounds like a fair system. Cool story bro.

I doubt this is because of a biased admissions process. It could be a variety of factors: 1. Differences in encouragement from parents, teachers etc. Differences in how much emphasis is put on education. 2. Related to #1 - state school kids may think they are not good enough and not apply. 3. Actual quality of education may be significantly better at those schools, especially in certain subjects. 4. Genetic potential…

...really, the quality of education at Eton is better than a school in inner London where you are in a class with 35 other people, 90% of whom don't speak English? That information surprises me...what insights.

The point is that:

1. The gap is very large. Those schools are only graduating a few thousand compared to hundreds of thousands students in state schools. Even if you compare with institutions that receive a huge number of applications from private schools (e.g. Edinburgh, Durham), the effect is disproportionate.

2. We need to make use of people who have the most ability. It is foolish in the extreme to suppose that going to Eton or having the right parents makes you a capable adult. You say the admissions process isn't biased...but we are optimising for whether you attended Eton. Speak to someone who didn't attend Eton or similar, and ask them if you think that is fair.

Btw, I went to a private school and went to a good university (that takes from private schools to a very high degree), and worked as an equity analyst (so meeting C-level execs and fund managers who mostly went to Oxbridge) your views are just generally very very wrong. These people are not capable or unusually smart. They just grew up in a safe environment with class sizes of less than 30 people. And UK management teams are, comparatively, very weak because there is no real meritocracy here. Sure, there are some good managers but this is basically certain in a large enough sample. And if someone has come up the hard way, they are usually a much safer bet. It is kind of crazy that you have picked one of the most busted, unmeritocratic societies in the world...and tried to show how it is actually fair...

Re: Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

#87

Post by throwawaymath »

agent008t wrote: post #51
Someone1234 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The lottery system depicted here is unfair to those students who've gone beyond and accomplished things. Conversely it might take some of the pressure off. As it stands there's never "enough." With a system that effectively caps you, you get to your lottery tier and can then back off. And considering how much the standards have increased over time to get into a school like this, that may not be a bad thing for ment…

Would you really want a future Feynman to be playing an admission lottery?

In the aggregate, yes - given the premise that most potential Feynmans are actually underutilized in society because they can't be reliably selected for. Then I think such a system could arguably be a net benefit, with a greater number of non-obvious Feynmans being selected. The very obvious Feynmans will likely be unperturbed by a lottery because the lottery is (hypothetically) per-school, and they have opportunities to shine in whichever school they join.

Re: Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

#88

Post by agent008t »

trowawee wrote: post #82
agent008t wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they actually care about extra curriculars though? Cannot remember of a single case in Oxford CS admissions where that was a factor, let alone a deciding factor. Usually those with loads of extra curriculars were not as good as those for whom maths/CS was their true passion. They would look like they had received better admissions interview coaching perhaps, but it was our job to see through that and it was not th…

Not trying to be unkind here, but you keep bringing up examples from Oxford in a discussion about the American higher education system. There's a big difference in culture between the two, and so discussing Oxford as a counterpoint doesn't really make sense. It's not an American outlier, it's a totally different system with its own issues and culture that don't have much to do with this conversation. And yes, schools…

Fair enough. I wrongly assumed that they would have very similar approaches to admissions, but maybe not. If the extracurriculars don't have anything to do with the degree in question, it seems wrong for Harvard to be putting weight on them. Luckily, there are other Universities in the world to choose from.

Re: Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

#89

Post by motohagiography »

throwawaymath wrote: post #71
motohagiography wrote: post #58

From a statistical perspective, in a fair random lottery, would not the shape of the probability distribution of attributes of winners necessarily match that of the resulting qualified applicants? If fairness is defined in this approach as a process that does not add information to the system, and in this case actually removes both information (bias) and noise (bias) equally, all it would serve to do is further obfus…

I don't really follow your first two paragraphs. I don't know about the ultimate utility of this system, but I don't think it exhibits the statistical properties you're saying it does. In a threshold-based admission lottery, everyone more than k sigma from the mean (for example) is collapsed into the same category, such that information distinguishing them is lost. But the implicit premise to this system is that you…

The point I meant to raise was that the underlying axiom of the piece is that the lottery is fair, when the mechanism for that fairness is simply removing information. There are lots of reasons for it, but a lottery is a fig leaf.

The proportion of input students of a type will be the same as in the the output of a fair lottery. Appeals to randomness just forfeit responsibility and ownership of the decision.

Re: Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery

#90

Post by subjectHarold »

trowawee wrote: post #80
subjectHarold wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that we miss out on some specific genius. The real issue with our system is that we have "Feynmans" working as waiters and driving taxis (and some other countries don't have that system and are maximising their talent). It is interesting to critique this idea for introducing chance. Pitch this idea to a poor person, pitch this idea to a rich person...that is your answer. It is hard to understand if…

Absolutely agree. I don't know how much this particular proposal would help them, though; I think catching those people would require a wholesale overhaul of the educational system: universal free pre-school, standardizing school funding nationwide (and specifically decoupling it from property tax revenue), fully subsidized university education for anyone who wants it...and then lotteries to get into elite schools. O…

Yep, I agree. The reason we have this problem at all is because, at least in our part of the world, education isn't well-funded. I think we should still have a lottery system but yes, other stuff will produce better results.

I also think that all the volunteering and whatever should be cut from applications. Who gives a fuck if you played the oboe for ten years? Does that really matter? The point of music is enjoyment, the point of volunteering is to serve other people. I had a friend who was forced to play the saxaphone until university and it was tragic: he wouldn't talk about it, he only played to pass exams, he took no joy from it...like great but if you are being forced to do this then who cares? It has become another way to discriminate...and it isn't that much fun if you are a kid.

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