That's an important thing to keep in mind. Particularly with the more elite schools, the goal isn't to educate as many people as possible, but to keep their inflated prestige through artificial scarcity. The Harvard Extension School is a great example of this - they have tens of thousands of students and advertise themselves as giving students a true Harvard education taught by Harvard educators, but the students aren't "official" Harvard graduates because the institution wants to keep that number artificially low and selective.
edX is another good example - sure, we'll give you the opportunity to learn these things, we'll even offer to assess you and give you a certificate, but we're not going to use technology to really open up the education system.
These institutions will pay lip service towards increasing underrepresented demographics (including racial and economic), but they're never going to embrace truly substantive solutions because they desperately want to keep the education credentials scarce.
Please provide examples because I am not aware of any.
In "other countries left" the left tag is defined by this topic (and this topic alone).
So, for someone not from america, your statement is a bit weird...
If the narrative was mostly about economic status, we would hear more about that and about universal programs. Rather than disparities and identity politics.
Like.... Universal healthcare? One of the most (perhaps THE most) discussed topics at democratic presidential debates?
Just because neither Bernie nor Elizabeth Warren didn't win the nomination doesn't mean that their ideas aren't part of the left.
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Many poorer people already get Medicaid which is quite good. If that was expanded a bit more to slightly higher incomes and [conservatives] states couldn’t deny so many people who should get it. That would be many times cheaper than Medicare for all. It would help the most marginalized.
Millions of people on good Medicaid right now could actually see their health insurance worsen under some universal health measures.
Her exact proposal was to phase-in full universal by starting with a subsidized public option and then spending more time building out a full universal plan, i believe.
You can argue this is a cop-out but i'd say it's more of a technocratic play - offering full universal would be a massive undertaking and not something that can just pop up overnight, but offering a subsidized insurance plan in the existing system is comparatively easier and could be implemented easily in a president's first year in office (with a cooperative congress, anyways)
Regardless, that's all aside the point
Free college education will not help the marginalized anywhere close to as it will others.
We essentially don’t even have free high school. If a teen has work a full time job or more while attending high school to support their family. That’s awful. That should be tackled before something as status quo as free college.
If I'm a 21yo man in North Dakota working the oil fields to support my young family, how would you expect me to react to the idea of increasing my taxes so that white collar kids don't have to pay as much?
Tanstafl.
Frankly though- the American education problem is just people talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs at two degrees removed.
You're using education in an ambiguous way here. Either you're including vocational training, in which case the argument for universal college doesn't follow, or you only mean college, in which case the premise is false.
How well "Whites" as a group are doing says nothing about "poor whites" and how they're doing. It's a fallacy of division, and anyway you shouldn't pre-judge things about people based on race... it's literally racial prejudice.
How so? "Poor whites" are just a subset of "whites". The parent comment claimed that "poor whites" are worse off. This is making 2 claims: that they are worse off because they are poor, and that they are worse off because they are white. I'm not denying that they're worse off because they're poor, that should be fairly obvious to anyone that knows anything about the American university admissions system. But the parent added the extra claim about race, and I'm refuting that for being inaccurate.
> and anyway you shouldn't pre-judge things about people based on race... it's literally racial prejudice.
Where in my comment did I make any racially prejudiced or racially divisive statements? The parent comment was the one that decided to divide the group of poor further by race.
Anyway, it's Harvard (and the other Ivy Leagues) that are pre-judging people by race. Is me discussing that fact somehow also "prejudging by race" and "racial prejudice"? I don't follow what you're trying to imply.
Edit: Looks like I confused the parent comment with the grandparent comment. The parent comment was about the "left" not caring about poor white kids. I think most of what I'm saying still applies, just replace "worse off" with "not cared about by the left". Ie. The left doesn't care about the poor too much, but they're definitely neutral towards whites, if not biased in favour.
"A fallacy of division is the error in logic that occurs when one reasons that something that is true for a whole must also be true of all or some of its parts."
Anyone poor won’t have the means to play the subjective system, and any left/liberal admin officer/provost in the Ivy’s knows that.
Champagne corks are flying tonight.
Rich whites were less threatened when they could game the system, but once Asian Americans began to become overly represented per capita academically and Affirmative Action lawsuits on descrimination against Asians began working up the courts... problem solved now.
There’s no outright conspiracy, these people know their position and what’s best for them. They’re probably not bad people but they’re not going to give away what they’ve got.
How would you change the incentives to make what you described less viable?
It’s too many trying to get into too few colleges. We need more, smaller universities. Federal funds/grants should be reoriented away from the Ivies. Zero Federal funds for schools that don’t have lower than 30:1 class sizes. That would stop admin bloat overnight.
The Musks, Gates and Bezos’ of the world should be building new colleges, not dumping more into the olds.
Ivies don’t need fed funds - they play a different game since the underlying markets tend to be asymptotic - the upper end of students, the upper end of professors, the upper end of athletes, the upper end of wealthy legacies.
Fund those with few resources or create new ones away from the Ivies. You can’t democratize the Ivies but you can give a lot more people a better education. The status quo is that the Ivies have their cake and eat it too.
> full $41.59 billion of the Ivy League’s money could be traced back to taxpayer-funded payments and benefits.
Traces back.
So part of it is tax breaks to educational institutions- which is natural, they have the biggest endowments combined so the tax benefits will be massive.
They point out that major research happens at these institutions so they have more money from that as well.
This meshes less with the “have their cake and eat it too” line of thinking and more a result of the distortions from reputation and network effects.
Liberals making conservatives personas non-grata means they have half as many people to compete with for a coveted spot at the top of the pyramid of power.
That's why there's so much talk of "disparity" or "inequality" vs. actual improvements to standards of living and quality of life. Almost all economic growth creates inequality for the simple reason that the more wealth there is, the more potential you have for skew.
In China, for instance, there was much less income inequality back in the 60's but I don't think too many folks want to go back to those days.
Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. To hear the new American left tell it though, we'd be better off all being equally poor instead of generally wealthier with a big differences between individual incomes.
Your quality of life depends very much on how much other people make. It's all relative. If the average income in an area goes up by 50% but your own income only goes up 5%, then you are worse off than you started, because prices for everything will rise with the market. If you don't believe me, look at Bay Area housing. Inject a couple thousand new millionaires into an area and tell me things don't become worse for the existing modest-income people.
On a percentage basis, the world is zero sum. If someone else captures (or creates) an additional 1% of something, that comes at the expense of 1% collectively from everyone else.
This is circular statement. Percentage is defined as a fraction of a some specified thing, so of course it's fixed. Ten percent of something is ten percent no matter how big or small that thing gets...
Anyway, I'm still not following your reasoning here. If you cut everyone's salaries where I work by 50% and only cut mine by 20%, that's still a bad day for me, even though I'm getting a bigger share of the total compensation paid out. People can argue about whether or not, or to what extent, wealth should be redistributed, but zero sum thinking is a bad path to go down and completely ignores humanity's ability to better its lot through innovation, trade, etc. It's a depressingly pessimistic worldview that prioritizes taking from others instead of creating things that others find valuable. At it's core it's a selfish ethos.
Today, if you look at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality is "rich get richer, poor get poorer."
Clearly, magic capitalism beans aren't the only ingredient in an economy that improves everyone's lot. My theory is that the other key ingredient is growth. Growth is chaotic and stirs money around, it's one of the precious few strong market forces that pushes towards equality rather than winner-take-all, even though it does so purely on entropic grounds and isn't strong enough to actually arrive anywhere near the maximum-entropy state.
Of course, once the growth stops, the market settles out again, and the real question is how to deal with that. "Try to stimulate growth at all costs" just creates bubbles. It's a tough question, but whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure it involves stirring money around, and I'm pretty sure big monied interests are going to fight it tooth and nail out of self-interest.
Yes, vast majority did not have to work while going to HS (which is possibly why some angles toward free HS should be focused on. Not free college). But they also weren’t freely going to Haiti.
What's the logic here? I'll admit I'm not a big fan of college sports myself, but who assesses the credibility of a college by their athletics program?
At Harvard specifically, beating Yale in football is a big deal within the community.
At large state schools, sports can function as an incredible arm of marketing. In addition to benefits for the alumni community and donations, it also can impact recruiting to undergraduate and graduate programs. Case in point, check out the change in the quality of the student body at the University of Alabama since Saban has been coaching the football team. It has improved not just the profile of the undergrad student body, but also the profile of the law school student body (among other grad schools, I’ve been told).
I will also add that being a varsity athlete puts the student in a totally-not-a-club club that makes a difference in certain social circles (especially in the northeast corridor).
One factor that comes to mind is location- Notre Dame is in the middle of damn nowhere, if they did not have the appeal of the football team I think they would have a harder time attracting students to actually go there (regardless of name recognition).
It also will probably depend on how much the rich alums care about sports, so again for a school like Notre Dame that has always been big on sports and is also very big on legacies and promoting alum community and what not, it makes sense.
To be honest I don't see why it matters much for today's Harvard though, at least none of the benefits I can think of really line up. Plus Harvard can never attract the truly best athletes because no Ivy scholarships/the generally lower level of Ivy competition in most sports. Maybe they just care about being better than Yale.
I think more generally it adds to the general culture of the school - people will pick up on the fact that some athlete they know went there and think that's cool, even if it doesnt impact their academics at all.
More cynically, lots of students love to associate their school's legacy with their own ego
They also bring back older graduates for a piece of nostalgia and bit of donation.
Test scores don’t prove much except who had the resources, time, and motivation to study the most. You could replace the SAT and ACT with obscure movie trivia and you’d see roughly the same distribution of scores and it would have the same predictive power. The people who signal that they’re willing to put it a lot of time, money, and effort into their education do well… surprised pikachu.
There’s no such thing as qualified for college outside of a genuine desire and motivation to do it.
So I don’t see any sort of contradiction in colleges admitting people based on novelty, coolness, and straight-up effort.
Aren't colleges looking for people who will study the most? Who have the motivation and the ability for the motivation to translate into results?
Dunno about you, but even if this is true, something that shows you were highly motivated and took time to do something seems very valuable if your goal is to produce people what produce.
In most areas of study, being motivated and investing time are key contributors to success. They aren't the only one. Intelligence, diversity of thought and resources matter too, but they certainly aren't negligible or dismissible.
I was under the impression that SAT prep doesn't move the needle much. Am I mistaken?
I have seen scores improve 100-200 points per skill on average for middle range scores, and 50-100 points per skill for higher range scores with quality preparation.
Reasons:
- familiarity with test format
- improved test taking strategies
- familiarity with test content
- developing the mental stamina to perform at a high level throughout the relatively long test
- lowered anxiety and (often) increased confidence
The college board says that an SAT is better predictor of success in college than GPA, which based on my experience of American high schools makes sense. I get that wealth probably has a positive correlation to both. But it seems that should matter a little.
Is this data or anecdata? You be the judge. He finds it easy to bank on professionally.
I encourage you to talk to someone who has worked at a high-end SAT training program (not Kaplan or that type). They can tell you the real deal, both successes and failures. Don’t rely on talking to the businesses themselves, because they will be selling their services rather than telling the complete truth (unless you know them personally).
Fwiw, failures are usually due to one of a few factors:
1. anxiety
2. learning blocks
3. physical issues (e.g., lack of sleep, sick, etc.).
But if you get put in the “honors” track of a lot of high schools where the name of the game is to teach material informed by the SAT, ACT, AP, and IB teats then you almost can’t help but do well since you’ve been cramming for 4 years.
That's not called cramming. It's called "learning". It means the test is working as intended.
You could say the same for pretty much every educated person who has done an undergraduate or postgraduate degree. Seems like a lot of human progress has been made as the result of people that have been "cramming for 4 years"
Of course colleges do all these things already, but imagine how much easier it will be for them when they don't have these pesky test scores showing the students they want to admit aren't qualified.