I'm not sure what your point is. Nobody mentioned Harvard. This de-values the efforts of parents to improve their kids education. If you devalue something, you get less of it. Simple as that.

Can you spell out how it devalues the efforts of parents to improve their children's education?

Sure. The adversity score looks at things like the crime rate of the neighborhood you grew up in. That neighborhood is (primarily) a function of two things: Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued. Some parents work really hard and pinch every penny to devote resources to their kid's education. Scoring kids based on adversity partially mitigates those efforts for the purpose of getting into college.

> Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued.

So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right? How well you are able to compete for a slot in college should depend on who your parents are?

> So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right?

Yes, for the reasons that I outlined. If you don't reward kids for their parents investment, their parents won't invest, and that will be worse for everyone.

If you spending 1 hour or 10 hours teaching your kids at night makes no difference to their life outcomes, which will you choose?

This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.

There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.

> This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.

Sure that may be true in relative terms. But at the margin, decreased reward -> decreased investment.

> There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.

That sounds like something that could be true, it just isn't. A Harvard degree is mostly about signaling. Once you are accepted to Harvard, you're nearly guaranteed to graduate (the graduation rate is 97.5%). Once you've gotten in, you're set. A huge number of jobs care more about marketing their ivy league staff than the actual skill output of that staff. You can do extremely well with zero talent and a Harvard degree. Obviously having both is better, but the Harvard degree itself confers tremendous value on anyone who has it, even if that person has no real skills or intelligence.

Now suddenly having dedicated parents and high-quality education is not a reward in itself. Why be king of a minor gold hill, if it cannot entitle you to rule a mountain, am I right?

The kid who gets a better education is still better off. High school isn't just a means to an end of going to college; you're learning lots of valuable things while you go there, that will help you for the rest of your life. And you're also being set up for better success in college because of that foundation.

To be clear then, you're not actually talking about quality of education (tutoring, robotics teams, mock trial, great teachers, enrichment activities, science museum trips, history competitions). As you say, it's "ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood". Your primary problem with this, then,is that it devalues the ability to move into rich neighborhoods.

How does the ability to move into a rich neighborhood correlate with college success? I teach math, so that would be a great place to give an example.

My point is this: parents have limited resources. They can devote those resources to things like: nice cars, fancy meals, vacations...or, they can devote them to educating their kids. Asian families notoriously prize devoting every last resource they can to educating their kids. That is a really great thing for society.

However, the adversity score policy being proposed here would blunt the impact of that resource allocation. When you blunt the return to an investment, you get less of that investment. If those same Asian families cannot improve their kids chances by making those sacrifices, then they have no reason to make those sacrifices.

You're exactly repeating OPs reasoning, yet you somehow completely disagree with it.

I don't get you, batbomb. But that's OK sometimes.

You live in a better neighborhood, you get a better education, you likely have healthier food available to you and grocery stores nearby, in addition to a school that probably cares a little bit about that sort of thing. There's still drugs in high school, but they are sold by the rich kids. There's tutors and test prep centers by your school. There's a lower probability of violent crimes and gangs. Sure, your family has to shop at the thrift store, you get hand-me-downs, and you don't get to go to Subway at lunch with your friends.

Somehow, all of that is rendered worthless when somebody going to a shitty school with shitty food wins the shitty school and home life lottery and edges them out of the more prestigious school with lower test scores thanks to the adversity bump.

Ultimately, good school kid must settle for highly regarded state school and post about how unfair the system is on a website for engineers and entrepreneurs. Shitty school kid becomes rich and famous because they went to an Ivy, everybody in the VC office loves them, buys a Tesla and their single mom a mansion.

Just kidding, shitty school kid had to drop out when their mom got sick junior year.

So is it okay then to have poorly educated people in college? This incentivizes everyone moving to a negatively rated district and getting a worse education, because it wouldn't matter, according to the logic.

That's assuming they calculated their adjustments precisely. And if they didn't, then welcome to all sorts of artificial biases in the system where a few more people appointed themselves to determine the fates of many. Congrats on solving nothing at all.

Asian dad should move the family to a shitty neighborhood and spend the saved money on private tutors. Get boosted scores from the “everyone equal” has hood adjustment on top of already good scores from all the tutoring.