For a better example of a meritocracy, take a look at New York's elite magnet schools like Stuyvesant. Their admissions process is a pure meritocracy - based entirely on a standardized exam that is taken by all applicants. The end result - Stuyvesant has far more economic diversity than any elite university. Almost half the students come from families poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches. Harvard would do the nation a tremendous service if it became more meritocratic, not less
I also don't understand why a three person class with one ethnically Chinese person, one ethnically Arab person, and one ethnically Indian person would be considered to have no racial diversity at all. Why is "Asian" one big race, but (for example) Caucasian and Hispanic two different races? It just seems so arbitrary.
Do you have an opinion on Stuyvesant's admission policy? Your comment seems rather pointed but stops short of condemning it.
Its the lack of black people that people worry about with regard to Stuyvesant. There is a lot of literature on how this comes to be. Fawn over “Pure meritocracy” if you like, the outcome in NYC wasnt expected and isnt leveraging the potential of its society.
When people discuss the merits of Diversity (capital D), the implication is that they are referring to the value of bringing in people from a variety of walks of life that might bring with them a variety and breadth of unique/disparate experiences to bear and to share. That is not often the case. People want to SEE photographic diversity. Unfortunately, varieties of experiences do not always correlate with varieties of skin color or ethnicity (though, they certainly can).
For example, my undergrad institution (a private, competitive engineering school) had a diversity policy that manifested itself in the student body. We had very few "under-represented minorities." The ones we did have were overwhelmingly international and wealthy.
It's important to point out that these folks DID bring diversity to the cohort, but it was because they were international, not because they had a certain color of skin. Their wealth actually made them the opposite of diverse economically-speaking. Still, they would always get photographed for the website, brochures, and other marketing material... The brochure would make you think that our school was a bustling melting pot of kids from Philadelphia, Compton, or the south side of Chicago when in fact these folks were kids of Latin American oligarchs and African quasi-royalty.
The school needed ACTUAL kids from the south side of Chicago to be able to REALLY check the economic diversity box (and poor white trash like me, of course).
In short, economic diversity is no less important than racial diversity. At least for issues where the sharing of experiences and perspectives is the goal, I think it represents a higher bar than brochure-diversity.
Not an easy task, but an important one!
600's (literally or metaphorically) were a non-starter. Those kids got chewed up and spit out. Putting a perfectly innocent, well-meaning, ambitious high-school grad in that position was not a desirable outcome for anyone.
The reason graduating from a prestigious school is valuable is because the graduates have some expected level of quality. Letting in stupid people doesn’t do the stupid people much good, and it certainly harms the prestige of an institution that was supposed to be focused on academics.
Would you add an obese minority to the olympic track team because the minority is underrepresented?
Education is uniquely different from training and certification. I say that as someone who has been through some of the most rigorous programs in both worlds. Education has no immediate impact on the outside world. You don't get to stamp a bridge design as a PE because you went to Stuy and MIT. You have to go through on-the-job training and certification exams. Same for physicians and attorneys. Education is part of it, but you absolutely have to pass the boards to practice.
Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team?
Also, this is Hacker News, why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here?
>Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team?
I don’t know, a gay Muslim, a queer Christian, what does it matter? Once you’ve started selecting for diversity rather than merit, you’ve failed no matter which minority you choose.
>why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here?
I don’t care about education, but that’s because in my field it’s relatives easy to check expertise with hands on exercises. But that misses the whole point of the conversation.
The only reason anyone cares about education on the hiring side is that it’s supposed to be an intelligence/competency signal. If you just let whoever into the MIT electrical engineering department because their skin is the right color then there really isn’t much to say for the aptitude of MIT EE grads.
Finally, if disadvantaged people performed up to par when placed in school and intelligence didn’t matter, then schools could simply save hundreds of thousands of dollars by firing the admissions department and replacing it with a random number generator.
Also, if one is of mixed race, say white and Asian, are they considered to be from a racially diverse group or are they not?
But the system property of inequality -- that is to say that American society is a highly stratified society with huge winners and huge losers -- is not going away, in fact American society is becoming more stratified. The elite universities perpetuate this system by conferring exceptional career benefits to their alumni.
Even though a few people will get promoted to the top, and nowadays some of them will even be women, people of color, etc., this system of inequality has some pretty painful drawbacks for most Americans, which manifest in long working hours, higher rates of mental illness, etc. as compared to more equal societies.
My understanding is that research shows very low levels of social mobility in the USA.
Disclaimer - I was not elite material when I was 18 and feel like I’m condemned for life when I read these posts.
Some of the richest kids in my high school paid full tuition to ivy league schools, didn't come to play school, and ended up with a scrappy job anyone could have gotten from just about any school. Work hard.
Yeah, the ability to be accepted into an elite program. This often has little bearing in real life (honestly, how much do you really care about the ability to get a good SAT score anymore?).
The cool stuff projects are never the right career move, the work/life balance doesn't exist, and even then you have to be on constant lookout for the right team to join.
"I'm willing to put up with insanity" is a more important criteria for working on cool projects than what school you went to.
Source: I've been on those cool projects, I've hired for them as well. End of the day, the questions "want to write an OS, work 70hrs+ a week and live under constant fear of not having a job when you come in tomorrow?" get asked, alma mater, not so much.
Of course at the end of the day, you get some great stories out of it. You also get literal grey hair, potential lost friendships (I lucked out there! Saw plenty of it around me though.), and an ongoing base level of stress that is very unhealthy.
But hey, great stories.
I think to some degree that you're using the school you did go to as a facile excuse to explain why you "haven't done cool stuff", when it's quite possible that that's not the reason at all, and that even if you had gone to that school you still wouldn't be "doing cool stuff".
And the farther out you are from college, the less and less it matters. In programming, past a certain number of years out, it may not even matter if you have a degree at all.
>I think to some degree that you're using the school you did go to as a facile excuse to explain why you "haven't done cool stuff", when it's quite possible that that's not the reason at all, and that even if you had gone to that school you still wouldn't be "doing cool stuff".
Right, it's more of a correlation for inherent inferiority in my case more than anything else, but that's besides the point.
I did get a 1580 though, so I feel called out :/
More broadly, from an economic perspective, there are outliers, but most people only move one income quintile up or down from where their parents are (or don't move at all). So while we have some leverage over our futures, this suggests that we have less leverage than we believe. (So, for example, does the fact that 65% of millennials think they'll be millionaires by age 45, even though only 6% of Americans are millionaires.)
Certainly there's no reason to beat yourself up for not achieving things that are exceptional on an absolute scale (unless maybe you were born at the top and blew all your advantages).
If I'd done it at 22, it'd have been a crappy OS.
Getting software patents is easy. I used to take time to file one whenever I had a 6 hour or more flight. Boredom and all that. Also my employer's patent bonus paid for my airfare.
You have decades of life left. One of my mentors had the time of his life programming in his 50s, putting his mark as a leader on multiple amazing products that sold in numbers ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions upon millions.
Up until then? Rather uneventful. If I remember, lots of years working on test equipment.
Semi-seriously, my team did solve a lot of very hard problems in a very resource constrained environment, and we didn't competitors sueing us to oblivion, so... patent everything!
:/
For each of those people there are a hundred that haven't done anything like that. "Ability" is a continuum: there are levels between "not doing anything" and "at the top of everything". Join your local research lab, try some competitive programming, do some open source work–just try your best and see what you can do! Not everyone can be the very best (though, it's entirely possible that you can, if you work hard and get lucky, so I don't want to close that off to you), but that doesn't make you unable to do cool things.
(FWIW, I'm in a middling undergraduate program, have no patents or papers in my name, and while I've competed in olympiads I have probably not done so at the level you're thinking of; I still feel that I've done cool things. YMMV, but if you want to chat personally feel free to shoot me an email.)
It seems clear that you aren't actually interested primarily in sound the cool things, but doing more cool things earlier than peers.
Also, being admitted to an elite school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I myself am actually an alumni of one of the “elite” schools more prominently featured in the middle of this admissions scandal. I took my $200,000 education and had two completely different but equally miserable careers (one as a travel agent and another as an overseas ESL teacher) before attending a coding bootcamp and landing in a field I love. I had no idea what I wanted my career or my life in general to look like when I was a high school senior, ended up using very little of what I learned in college, and could have saved my parents a lot of money and financial worry by attending a JC instead.
That’s not to say my classmates didn’t achieve a lot- of course they did. But that’s more a function of who they were when they entered college than who college made them into.
A lucky few people are precocious enough at that age to already know where they’re headed in life. Most people aren’t. That’s no one’s fault, least of all theirs.
There should be a fair evaluation of students, designing that fair evaluation isn't trivial, but it's something we can work toward.
That's why "legacy admissions" even exist. If your dad or your mom went to Harvard, of course you'd want to sustain the family line and have an easy time to get admitted to Harvard too.
I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or death urgency—maybe we should be as selective as possible to make sure we're finding the best scientists or whatever. But the idea that Harvard is using its hideously huge tax-deductible endowment to teach rich people's children to do high frequency trading is far more scandalous than these marginal cases of bribery.
As a society, we should not be devoting so many resources to helping the best-positioned kids succeed to the exclusion of kids starting with less advantage.