Here the common strategy for STEM degree programmes is to admit most people and then make first year hard enough that e.g. 2/3 of students are eliminated. In some sense it is more fair than strict admission criteria.

My college did this. They don't have the strictest admission standards, but they're ranked well in STEM because of this. What's funny about people criticizing standardized tests in college admissions is, at least in a big school, 80% of your Calc I grade is effectively three standardized tests, so if someone's just "a bad test taker," throwing them into the deep end with 1200 other freshman engineers isn't doing them any favors.

My university, another state school, did the same sort of thing. They have something like a 50% graduation rate, and employ the same sort of washout techniques in science classes. My freshman CS classes dropped to less than a quarter of their initial size by the end of the first semester. The math department is very selective about transferring credits too, to stop people from taking an easier Calc class at a community college.

I can see a future cynical me talking about how brutal it is to lure poor students and have them take loans to pay first year tuition only to kick them out a year later with nothing to show for it, if they're not the top 1/3 for some reason.

This is in the context of a free education system, the only thing the poor students loose is a bit of time.

A year is A LOT of time, and you have to explain why you lost a year later on.

Also, even in "free" education systems, some taxpayer is going to ask "why the hell am I paying for 2/3 of crappy students, can't you just raise the bar at the beginning, and only accept the top 1/3?"

A year is a lot? Then what is 5 years, a lifetime? Let's not fool ourselves, a year is NOTHING, it passes as soon as it arrives. There is nothing bad with people "loosing" a year or two, or perhaps even more.

In an ever more pacing world, we should readjust and look back, some might "sacrifice" a year, but they also learn valuable experience so not all is lost.

Today, when people's work time can last 50 years easily, what is a year or more? Let people "search for themselves". Let them try out the hard things, let them explore and value experience, realize if something is for them or isn't.

In the end, we learn most from our mistakes, not successes.

I sometimes wish I could remember that a year is a short time. I’m often wracked by guilt about not progressing at sub-yearly “ticks” on some aspects.

It is not that they do not learn anything during that year. Also, many of them later got admitted to some 'easier' school and got their credits transferred.

> and you have to explain why you lost a year later on.

That's only if you do nothing else for the rest of the year...

not grandparent, but where i live it's the same system: ten years ago tuition were 230€/year until your master degree, roughly half got cut after the first year and a fifth/quarter the second year.

That's essentially the same argument Supreme Court justice Rehnquist made during a case regarding the use of affirmative action in university admissions.

Oh oh. Those are called Caribbean medical schools.

In some sense more fair, but also in some senses less kind and less efficient. Let me give an anecdotal view as someone who had a brush with it at another big state school.

University of Washington (Seattle) has a similar system in which some majors are 'capacity constrained' meaning some students would be directly admitted to the program, but the vast majority of them would only enter the major program after being accepted via application while already attending school.

Highly competitive programs included Business and Engineering, but this even spilled over into less popular STEM variants like Math. Their CS program was and is the most competitive of these. At its worst an application round would have ~2000 applications and only ~600 open slots.

During my time there, I met a handful of students that had applied every session for the last few years to no avail. The opportunity cost is enormous. It's both a waste of time and money on the part of the students to spend multiple years wasted taking intermediate courses, retaking major-application required courses and reapplying. That's why the administration is slowly converting over to deciding major on admission, too much visible grievance on the part of students.

That aside, if it's competitive enough, it turns into a second college admissions process. Students retake the core classes required for an application like they would retake the SAT or ACT. Never mind that they passed CS 142 with a 3.4, only a 4.0 will get them in so they waste a quarter perfecting the most basic java programs for content they learned a few months prior. Students also try to engineer around the competition: a common refrain was that the equivalent courses at community college were much easier, but given the same weight in the admissions process so students would go to another college to take an easier course just to have a better shot at their dream major.

The point is that the competition for these colleges will come to a head somewhere. If it's not the college application process then it will be at the school itself. It can be managed, but putting it off till later leads to a greater burden on the losers of this process. They are faced with the choice of changing majors, changing schools or persisting with the hope that maybe the fifth application will be different than the fourth.

Fostering this kind of environment was a mistake on the part of UW. Perhaps it would have been better if they restricted applications to first years and weeded them out completely from the start like they do in your area, but letting the college admissions process do it might be much more efficient on the part of both the schools and the students.

Or they could hire more teachers. Why is education competitive and exclusive? It makes no sense. The whole thing pays for itself in value creation.

Why have two or three instructors when you could have one associate Dean! The associate Dean even comes with a PhD! Never mind that it's in "educational leadership". That's the equivalent to a real topic. And it pays better too.

The reason people want to go to Harvard and MIT is because it's competitive and exclusive.

You can take the same courses online and buy all the same books but that doesn't prove you're smart and hard working enough to get into Harvard and MIT. Almost all of the value in going to Harvard over Boston community college is in the degree which proves you made it into an exclusive and competitive group.

Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t pay for itself in value creation (“Human Capital Theory”). If you’re interested in this topic, I’d recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education.

They essentially do, but on other campuses throughout the state. The prestige of a University of Washington degree is much higher than one from Eastern Washington University and the quality at UW is probably also higher than that of EWU and similar schools but a student is going to be better off getting out into the world getting hands on experience with a bit lesser quality education.

rather than accepting them for an entire year and then kicking 2/3rds of them out, why not don't kick them out and just teach three times as many students. feels more humane somehow

That’s called lowering your standards. It punishes the third who would have made it under the old system. Better to have a test. Doesn’t waste a year of the lives of the two thirds who drop out.

Me learning doesn't hurt you.

But lowering the standards does. And that’s the only way you’re going from a pass rate of a third to 100%. You might be able to double pass rates to two thirds by putting many more resources into teaching but that costs money or comes out of research time/teacher satisfaction. You learning does hurt the top of the class if you’re a marginal student. Students on the verge of failure take up a lot more instructional and administrative time than the top third who were going to get through anyway.

Ha, my school straight up bell curved the grades for most classes at the TA level so that a certain number of kids were always going to get a D/F both of which are not passing grades and thus requiring the student to either retake it or switch majors. I myself had to retake 3 classes to get through it and I have had to explain it to one of my parents clients whose son is in the program and has now retaken his 4th class as a junior.

It was pretty brutal but also highly effective at getting me to really study the material to stay above the curve and pass.

If they were going to get through anyway, then where's the harm in then diverting some attention to bring others along too?

Also, from the context given here it's not as black and white as pass vs non-pass or "lowering standards" - it's about a rolling cut off on the amount of students they can take.

What's wrong with spending more time on helping struggling students?

That it inevitably means dropping the most challenging i.e. most valuable parts of the course? Not only are resources not infinite; if you make them accessible to worse students, that necessarily means removing the parts which are inaccessible.

To play devils advocate its not free and by default the cost accrues to the more successful students who may not have the financial resources to pay the additional funds and may opt not to attend despite being quite qualified. In some cases you may be trading more qualified graduates for less.

For some the truth may be that their lack of success may be external issues that can't be resolved by an additional investment of staff resources or just unsuitability for the program that can't be resolved other than by picking a more suitable major.

There is of course in the context of US education which wastes massive amounts of money so the actual answer is to stop wasting money on sports and invest that money in students but in all cases resources remain finite and some failure rate is inevitable.

In the context of the US, the lack of proper financial support coupled with the lack of a proper vocational education system means that a lot of people go to college when they will not succeed.

In the case of struggling students. I think it's hard to dismiss a person because they struggle in a single course. I failed calculus 2 and now I'm about to finish a PhD doing statistics and machine learning. Should I have been "let go" so to speak upon that failure?

Failures matter when they are cumulative not singular. This is why early warning systems in education fail so much. They rarely have enough information to provide a warning that is actually early.

Good point

It does though. If a teacher has to teach 50 students instead of 17, that is a huge difference in the amount of attention any given student will have for help. Teachers scale better than some things, but not infinitely.

The most important benefit of a university degree is the credential itself, indicating personal characteristics of the graduate. Lowering standards directly hurts the value of said credential. Learning is a side-effect of the process.

You are correct but isn't that strange and defective?

If you're not making into year 2 (or year 3), you can repeat ad vitam aeternam.

Now the school has a bad reputation, and students who spent four years of time and tuition have a diploma worth nothing?

Students are only occasionally actually kicked out. Much more common is that they struggle with the coursework, decide it isn't for them, and pick a different direction.

How many years of time do you think it is humane to provide to a student before suggesting somehow that they might consider an alternate use of their time?

Where I went, there was a hierarchy of lesser degrees to pick from.

That is a very expensive way of deciding who gets a degree. Also, it doesn't eliminate the problem of scarcity with those first year seats. You still need to decide who gets the chance to try in year 1.

The colleges also make more money that way. A 500 person freshman lecture class is a money maker. A 50 person capstone class is a money loser. I agree it's nice to give people a chance but it's not all rose considering the debt many of those people who don't make it take on.

What does those 2/3rd do then? Do they lose a year?

That depends on the student's choices. I dated a woman in college who was trying to get a degree in speech pathology. Because it was an "impacted" program, they use the process of having students take general core courses and then reevaluating them. She didn't get into the program after her first year. Given the choice of taking degree adjacent courses for a year or changing majors, she chose to go into special education instead. There were other schools in the state that offered speech pathology but they were branch campuses. Given the choice between speech pathology from a directional school or a special education degree from Big State University, she went with special education. That was her choice. From what I can tell from her Facebook posts, it seems to have worked out well for her.

The devil you know is better than the devil you dont.

SAT and ACT has been around for so long, I think college admissions can account for deviations to a certain extent.

Wow. I read this news on Twitter first and immediately thought what you so eloquently wrote above (even so far as comparing the imperfect measure to democracy or capitalism). Except I didn't find a single representation of this view on Twitter. When I come to HN I actually become more optimistic for the future of the world. Thank you.

Finland, often touted as the best in education, does not use SAT. The same can be said for many other European countries with excellent education. Are you implying there is no correlation? Have you looked at their systems before making a claim such as "haven't come up with anything better"?

Most european countries use very comprehsensive exams that govern not only admission into top universities, but are tied into being able to get a job AT ALL in a certain profession.

Basically - the countries have a number of slots for a profession they are looking to fill or that they expect demand for. They create that many university places that create eligibility for the position. Getting into these spots can be ridiculously difficult and the standardized exam is weighed MUCH MUCH more heavily than in the US (with it's "holistic" approach).

Whether or not this merit based / tracking based approach (which actually starts earlier in high school and before for many countries) is what leads to excellent outcomes is a question. But the tradeoff with free education is that the really expensive education has lots of criteria before you get it for free.

False by the way - Finland uses SAT a fair bit (often a minimum SAT is needed to even apply, ie, 500/500) if you didn't sit their entrance exams.

Spots are awarded very heavily based on points that anyone can calculate.

"Admission to the LAB University of Applied Sciences is dependent on scores earned either in the entrance examination or in SAT-test. Eligibility in itself does not yet guarantee admission. Student selection will be a competitive process in which the best Finnish degree certificates or entrance examination results or SAT results produce a place of study. See the studyinfo.fi -page for more information about student selection.

The applicant with the highest points score will be offered the first place, the second highest will be offered the second place, and so on until all places available have been offered.

In cases of equal minimum admission scores applicants will be ranked on the following ground:

all students with the same score will be selected."

Finland has its own national exam. Many European countries have something like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriculation_exam_(Finland)

I'm obviously speaking about the SAT/ACT in the context of the US system. The entire Finnish education system is extremely different than the one in the US - to say that they don't use the SAT and have better educational outcomes while ignoring everything else is just not a valid comparison. It would be equally valid to say "Finland teaches school in Finnish and they have better outcomes, so we should be teaching school in Finnish!"

There some people who assert that it is in fact the Finnish language that gives them an advantage in early schooling, that the language is much more regular and easier to learn that it gives school children something like a 2 year advantage over English learners.

Not disagreeing with you at all. Just wanted to point out another facet of the debate.

On the other hand, it is sometimes said (in folk circles, I'll admit, I haven't seen papers about this) that the good performance of Chinese students is related to having to learn a very difficult writing system, which acts as a cognitive "exercise" or stimulation.

So what's better to learn as a child, an easy to learn language or a really difficult one? Or maybe an easy one orally but a difficult writing system? I have no idea, but it's an interesting question indeed.

A key advantage seems to be no private schools:

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-am...

FYI, the article referenced while informative is from 2011. Finland performance on the PISA has dropped steadily since then. Article also does not discuss whether wealthier families hire tutors or other similar resources to assist their children.

It's an interesting idea. The other major language similar to Finnish is Estonian. Recently Estonia has been above Finland in PISA results, but I am still extremely skeptical of this idea. From a grammar standpoint I'm not sure that Finnish is actually easier to learn than English.

The other similar language to Finnish is Hungarian (that and a language spoken in Mongolia). My wife is Hungarian, so I have some exposure and I think the grammar is probably simpler in some ways (no "perfect" tenses for example), it is the spelling that probably would push it over the line.

Spelling in English is an atrocious amalgam of contributions from a number of languages. My son is learning that in school so I am getting a front-row seat to that (especially given me out of work and remote schooling). He is constantly running into places where the rule he just learned does not apply.

Oddly, I have heard the argument before that Japanese and Chinese students are at an advantage due to the complexity of writing their languages. The argument being that their brans are being trained by that to work harder. I am not sure I buy either argument.

There is a somewhat related argument that kids who grow up bilingual also get a harder brain workout that initially slows their language learning due to having to parse two languages but later gives them an advantage. I think maybe, but seems really hard to measure something like that.

My kid is growing up bilingual, with English his stronger language. We both grouch about the "atrocious amalgam of contributions" that is the English language when he wants an explanation why the words 'rough', 'though', 'through', 'thought' and 'plough' all have different pronunciations.

European entrance exams, including Finland's, are far, far worse than the SAT. They are much more serious and shape one's life far more and enforce systemic bias to much higher extreme.

I don't have direct experience but I think the whole system in Europe is designed to irrevocably pigeon hole students very early in the game.

If I remember California State Colleges have a bunch of placement tests to gauge what level of classes to put beginning students in. I think I'd be happier with a system that throws a net wide and than deals with the result on an as needed basis. Than a hyper meritocratic system that excludes large segments of society.

> the whole system in Europe

Pet peeve: There is no European system. At least every country has their own unique system.

So whats your point here?

That your statement about "the whole European system" is factually incorrect, because every single country takes their own approach, and there are huge variations between them.

Trying to tar the whole of Europe with one brush would be like Europeans conflating the US education system with Paraguay and Ecuador because it's the "whole American system".

So whats your point here?

Can't speak for all European countries as Europe is very diverse, but in Spain it's perfectly possible (and lots of people do it every year) to get top marks in the "selectivity" (entrance) exam after going to free public elementary and high schools. My partner grew up in a dairy farm, her parents have no degrees, she went to a small school in her small town in the middle of nothing, and she got into a medicine degree, which is one of the degrees with highest grade threshold. And it's not a unique story, it's quite common. So I don't think there is that much systemic bias. Especially if you also factor in the fact that tuition is cheap, or even free if your income is not high, so student debt isn't a thing either.

My understanding is that this is also true of the SAT, apart perhaps from the cost of tuition.

Would you mind explaining the difference? From a perfunctory search online it looks like Finland also has a system of university entrance exams (although of course theirs aren't called the SAT)

In France, you have special schools (classes préparatoires) where you spend 2 years after high school just to prepare the entrance exam of the most competitive schools. The entrance exam can last for a week, with two 4-hour exams a day, and is marked anonymously.

They don't care that you were the captain of the fencing team or can play harmonica.

I have never heard of Finland being touted as the best in education, especially not at the college or post-graduate levels.

What many countries do, unlike the US, is having life-defining entrance exams. Unlike the SAT/ACT which are just one factor of many, these tests determine whether a student gets in to a university or not.

The SAT may not be a great test, but at least it's not the sole factor in determining admission. It's absolutely better than what most European systems use.

> I have never heard of Finland being touted as the best in education, especially not at the college or post-graduate levels.

Finland has been the poster child in pre-university education now for almost two decades due to the good PISA results. Maybe less so recently as Finland's results have been in a slight decline.