This is by design. There exist tests that can distinguish between the merely very good and the outstanding. Elite US universities go out of their ways to not use them, precisely so they can admit the merely very good legacies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School#Demogra...
The number of Black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science was an order of magnitude higher in the 1970s; the current demographics are a consequence of paid preparation being a reliable way to score highly on the SHSAT.
Nope. Just like money, there’s also an intellectual family bank that gets inherited. And it’s not genes, it’s access to knowledge which is purchased by capital.
Of course genes play a part, but eugenics is mostly economic and political discrimination, not objective assessment of absolute potential.
That doesn't follow at all. IQ is correlated with parental IQ, due to genetics. Equally plausible, if not more so, than "books cause high IQ" is "high IQ causes books". Smart people a) like to read, and b) have smart children. I don't think it's likely that kids are boosting their IQ scores by cracking open their parent's book collection.
The hypothesis "smart people are likely to buy more books, and smart people are likely to have smart children" sounds quite plausible to me. Does it seem implausible to you?
The best way to convince me that books directly increase IQ is to donate a ton of books to kids who need it, and measure the gains. (As a side effect, you would probably win a Nobel price if that worked.) My experience with charity says that actually many people are willing to donate books to charities; charities refuse them, because they already have enough books and the kids are not reading them anyway.
There are many ways how poverty can hurt intellectual development. This is not one of them.
There are many people who want to get rid of old books for kids, because the kids grew up and don't need them anymore; if you asked them to donate the books to you, you would be doing them a favor -- saving them from a dilemma between the bad feeling of throwing the book away, and the wasted space at home. If any NGO would bring a truck and say "please give us the books for kids you no longer need", the truck would be full in an afternoon. Then... according to your theory, the truck could go a few blocks further and turn hundred poor kids into Einsteins. I would be so happy if that worked! Unfortunately, it does not.
Similarly, an organization of students maximizing academic performance has a certain vibe that definitely doesn't feel "perfect". It doesn't even seem like that useful of a skill, but I'd have to know the purpose of a uni to comment further.
If I fail, that's easy. I lick my wounds and go home.
But if I pass? The shape of the distribution -- basically slicing off one end of a bell curve -- means that in all likelihood, I would be at the lower end of the IQ scale within the group, even if at the upper end within the overall population.
So I'd be taking a test and paying money for the privilege of being the dumbest person in the room. It hardly seemed attractive to me.
I'm not sure why one would even think an academic test could determine success. One of the biggest lies many of us have been told is that if you're just smart enough you'll be successful. Sorry, but that's not how it works.
[0] https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/predicting-college-suc...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-22/grades-v...
One very important piece of insight I gained throughout that time is that after you use some exam to get the top 25% (ish) percent of students, the exam performance really does not matter: it does not correlate with scientific output or originality of work. If anything, I had to unlearn some of the skills that made me good at olympiads because they were severely limiting my creativity. At an olympiad you know there is a solution, while true research problems might be unsolvable and need to be approached differently.
TL;DR: Exams (selective or not, hard or not) are great at giving you the top 20% of students, but they are inherently terrible at telling you who among the top 20% will be a productive scientist or engineer.
In particular the famous Benbow study [1] that established that even among the top percentile of the population there are massive differences: the top quarter percentile (99.75-99.99) was 2-3 times more likely to have authored academic research later in life, and about 1.5x more likely to have attended postgrad education, to have gone for a STEM degree, to have gone for a PhD than the bottom quarter of the top percent (99.00-99.24).
To start testing the validity of the claims in this paper a study needs to be performed where the strength of effect has to be considered, when comparing a similar one-percenter group and a larger ten-percenter group. My prediction is that the strength of effect would show only negligible differences, confirming my hunch that the special treatment[1] is what created the new subdivision in this new group.
More reading material on this topic would certainly be interesting, if you have anything in mind.
[1]: The special treatment in this paper being telling a kid "you are only a 7th grader, but you are as smart as a high schooler".
I am asking, because if I have to choose between my empirical observations (anecdotal as they are, given it is n=1 observers), and a single piece of research without followups, I do feel justified to stick to what I have seen myself. But I am open to be convinced otherwise.
I don't understand why that is some secretly accessible knowledge that is only available to some. FWIW, the ACT always seemed more game-y to me what with its hard time crunches and stuff.
They aren't being used, so they aren't the existing standardized tests, which are being used.
But it's not that hard to simply extend the difficulty gradient higher. Stick some math olympiad-type problems on there, for instance.
Of course I can’t find a reference for that right now, but it certainly doesn’t predict college graduation rates best.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/06/11/what-...
It's much simpler to have a candidate include notable achievements on their CV including competitions and after-school programs. However, even here you'll find factors that don't correlate to future performance e.g. those with the means and desire to min-max a CV for college admittance ( A very important life skill ) may not be the best leaders, academics, or students.
While both of the above skills will be correlated to future performance there are almost certainly diminishing returns from selecting the top .1% according to a single dimension.
Curiously the list of fields medalists does not appear to contain a mathlete at present. Providing at least one datapoint that performance in math competitions may not be correlated to future (Academic) mathematics achievement.
That's in line with my experience, too. Selecting olympiads is a preference for highly competitive people. In math, at least, collaboration is much more important.
The difference between kid who gets a 1550 and a 1600 on the SAT is so marginal that calling one "outstanding" and one "merely very good" is just silly.
Is that difference the extra $20,000 parents spent on tutoring? Or is that difference actually correlated with outcomes in and after college? Doubtful.
There are tens of thousands of adults all over the world who went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford etc. that then went on to live completely mediocre middle class lives.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that but my point is that how you do on a test at 16-17 years old does not make you a "genius", nor does scoring in the 99.999% ensure that a person will achieve academic or career outcomes superior than the person who scored 99.9%
What tests are these?
Cachet and cachait do have the same though. Same for caché and cacher.
I'll be honest I have no idea what the difference is between these two.
"et", "è", "ai" are all pronounced the same. Similar to the "e" in "best".
For "é" and "er" I struggle to find a definite English equivalent sound. Sometimes "a" is close, but it depends on the accent of the speaker. Maybe the best example is just the last "é" when pronouncing "Beyoncé" or "fiancée"
But I pronounce chachet nothing like the e in best. It seems much more similar to a french "é"
This is how I pronounce it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=cachet+pronunciation&oq=cach...
Though you'll be happy to know that where I grew up in Texas, everyone tried to pronounce "croissant" the French way when (and only when) ordering one at a deli counter. But we weren't far from Paris, Texas.
What I said is incorrect, is the parent poster saying it sounds closer to "é" than the sound of "best".
If you can't tell the difference, too bad for you, but that doesn't make you right.
"è" (or "et" in French) is pronounced /ɛ/. Wikipedia will confirm that this is indeed the same sound as in "best" (/ˈbɛst/). https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/best
"é" is not the same sound. It's pronounced /e/ like in "fiancée" (/fiˈɑnseɪ/) https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fianc%C3%A9e
> anglicised pronunciation which is correct in English
All the links I have posted are for the anglicised version of the French words.
Cachet is an english word in this context, so how could the English pronunciation be incorrect?
> "è" (or "et" in French) is pronounced /ɛ/. Wikipedia will confirm that this is indeed the same sound as in "best"
Yep.
> "é" is not the same sound. It's pronounced /e/ like in "fiancée"
Also yep. Nobody is disputing you on those.
The problem is when you're saying that the english pronunciation for an english word is incorrect." It can't be. Cachet, in this context, is an english word and this is the english pronunciation.
Just... No.
I don't get it, what is wrong with you people for trying to teach a French how a French word is pronounced?!
"é" is pronounced /e/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-mid_front_unrounded_vo...
"è" is pronounced /ɛ/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_front_unrounded_vow...
The Wikipedia page contains audio samples which are accurate.
"cachet" (phonetically "cachè") is definitely pronounced differently than "caché".
The difference may seem subtle and inexistant for English speakers, but for native French speakers it's definitely different sounds...
I don't understand what is the point of arguing when a native speaker + Wikipedia tell you that you're wrong.
Do you understand? This is the statement that we're saying is incorrect. The english word cachet is not pronounced phonetically "cachè" in english. There is another word, cachet, in french. It is not the same word. It does not mean the same thing. It has a common etymology, but that doesn't make you the authority on its pronunciation.
You are trying to argue with an American how an English word since the 1600s is pronounced!
I was looking at the English wiktionnary but in the French section of the word which mentions /ka.ʃɛ/. The English section indeed uses /ˈkæʃ.eɪ/.
My apologies, you were right.
I'm not telling you how it's pronounced in French, I'm suggesting how I pronounce it in English using French as a reference. I don't really think an accent aigu sounds anything like an accent grave.
I don't pronounce "cachet" as "cachè" but rather "caché".
You are right it's pronounced like "caché" in English. My apologies.
This is similar, there needs to be enough for people being accepted to and graduating from a university so when the rich kids also does it people think that he is smart and accomplished.
Some of them will go into politics and business, and their entitlement and delusionally rosy view of their talents will make them a national liability.
You really want to steer rich slackers towards wasting their lives with dumb hedonism, keeping them as far away as possible from any activity with strategic influence.
That's before even considering that some small amount of what graduating from one of these schools conveys is a high likelihood of having networked with other people that will be well placed later. My naive expectation is that someone graduating with a science major from MIT might have had a harder curriculum than someone graduating from that same major from Harvard, but I also (again, naively) expect that the person from Harvard may have made contacts with people that will be more diversely placed and in more powerful positions later.
It is tricky to maintain the 'prestige' associated with an institution doing this, so I don't really agree with making it too public. But, after all, it was kinda an open secret that this happens and the prestige was maintained away, so if it kept happening with a bit more legitimacy it probably wouldn't change much. Prestige doesn't just mean academic credentials: for some people, if they see Berkeley on a resumé they probably want it to be because that applicant is super-rich and well-connected!
My ideal reform would be a simultaneous enactment of several things:
* allow people to pay millions to go to college; allow this to fund student aid for other students. Explicitly stop using it to build buildings
* stop having all of these overfunded and weirdly inappropriate sports institutions as a core part of academia.
* stop with massively-inflated grades that allow the rich-but-undercapable kids to graduate with the appearance of successful academics. They can buy their way in but they have to do as well as everybody else after that.
* ensure that the influx of money from rich kids' applications doesn't go to administrators in any way, as that would incentivize them to over-prioritize these people.
This reframes things so that the point of strong applications isn't to _get in_, it's to get the scholarships required to get in for free instead of paying the absurd tuition. Meanwhile the school has to keep admitting remarkable kids in order to maintain its brand as prestigious. All of this is already how it works, but making it explicit ought to align incentivizes in a way that makes the whole thing less disturbingly bizarre.
The state schools already do this. It's called "out of state tuition". For example, UC Berkeley charges California residents $14k/yr tuition while everyone else pays $44k/yr. Not surprisingly, the number of out of state students admitted to the UC system is increasing every year. [0]
[0]https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...
At D1 schools the football and basketball programs generate huge revenue, which is used to subsidize less popular sports (particularly women's teams under Title IX). For better or worse a lot of prospective students care about sports and it's a factor in making colleges more attractive.
and --
Lots of people care about sports but that's partly cause lots of people in the past cared and baked it into our culture. It's still a perverse misalignment of incentivizes -- education should be about education; university should be about education + social development + various other forms of development. The American university system is largely about sports and partying for lots of people and I hope no one thinks that's healthy. I don't necessarily think the big sports should be cut, but there's no reason in 2020 that a university should regularly have people who are there on, like, golf scholarships. Universities should certainly take remarkable people of all walks of life -- but the emphasis on sports is insanely beyond what is appropriate.
Seriously?
I'd never even thought about mentioning college grades _in my country_ and if somebody e.g during interview tried to use tham as strong argument then I'd consider it as a red flag
why anybody competent would need to brag about something unreliable as grades?
This isn't really true beyond specific gates (college admission, grad school administration) and for a couple of years after you graduate. 5 years after graduation no one looks at someone's college grades.
> Lots of people care about sports but that's partly cause lots of people in the past cared and baked it into our culture.
What does this mean? Sport is baked into culture but that's because people still like it. And the changing popularity of different sports (eg MMA 25 years ago vs today) shows that this isn't some forced behavior - people like watching and participating.
I meant, the reason college sports are such a big deal in America is that they've been growing for decades with the support of tuition, donations, etc -- which is due to the perverse state of American university system. It didn't necessarily have to end up like this, but it would be hard to undo it now because it has become so important to so many people.
Most elite colleges (not the UCs though) offer 100% need-based aid to accepted students and are need blind in the admissions process. This comes directly from the endownment or the rich alumni and donors already.
* stop having all of these overfunded and weirdly inappropriate sports institutions as a core part of academia.
I completely agree.
* stop with massively-inflated grades that allow the rich-but-undercapable kids to graduate with the appearance of successful academics. They can buy their way in but they have to do as well as everybody else after that.
They do have to do as well as everyone else. Grade inflation is a school-wide phenomenon, but GPA in general is a poor indicator of academic performance: all of the prospective med school students at my school are being advised to apply to colleges which practice grade inflation. The grading system at colleges is taken into account by graduate and preprofessional programs.
* ensure that the influx of money from rich kids' applications doesn't go to administrators in any way, as that would incentivize them to over-prioritize these people.
The admissions office is somewhat decoupled from the rest of the institution, and receive fixed salaries -- this problem does not exist.
With the little weird caveat that poor students at top institutions have to work doing things like cleaning the bathrooms of the richer kids as part of their "term-time work expectation" for receiving financial aid.
I think I recall recently reading that some schools might have finally eliminated the requirement (maybe, Yale?) but I'm not sure. It was definitely the case at Harvard as of ~March 2020. (but probably not for this year for obvious reasons!)
It's not the admissions office that that was targeted at. The donations today go to programs, buildings, etc -- things that involve lots of administrative staff and leaders who are payed executive-level salaries. This should all be going to support students and educators.
That's true until the University is so rich that it no longer has any need to acquire any more money. Harvard has a $40 billion investment fund. No amount of rich kids are going meaningful move the needle there. At that point, why bother selling spots to rich kids at all? If you're worried about bribery, why not just literally ban students whose parents are wealthy?
Harvard benefits from the prestige of its alum network, and admitting the children of wealthy parents ensures a certain level of influence/access to said parent.
The correct way to do this is via marginal tax rates.
Letting rich people choose who to subsidize results in them building up their own tribes.
Obviously government has some of the same risks, but theoretically, at least they can be countered with laws requiring transparency and allowing for corrective actions if problems are found.
Admittance is a zero sum game, someone paying to get in doesn't subside another student they take their spot.
This is also known as a progressive taxation system.
Lots of boys sitting in their rooms smoking weed and ordering pizza and having to be edged out over 2 or 3 years because their parents paid for a swimming pool...
It needs plausible deniability to work.
A guy walked up to me and straight up offered to pay me to do his senior project for him. I reported him to his academic advisor. She told me "Thanks for telling me, but there's not much we can do about it without causing an international accident." So next time we saw each other, I agreed to help him with his senior project if I got to go a few rounds with him. He didn't take me up on it.
You could usually tell which group a given individual was from, and saying so was a common insult. Either "Your folks may have money, but you're dumb as a post", or "You might be smart but you're poor". There were a select few students where the circles seemed to overlap...
So we already had two categories of students, with somewhat different prices and somewhat different admission standards. I don't see a problem with adding adding more categories along the same lines, as long as some minimum academic standard is enforced.
If I'm in the middle category, I'm happy with my peers who pay more than me because they subsidize the other categories, and I'm happy with my peers who pay less because they elevate the school's reputation.
I can see that for UC Berkeley, but would that be true of somewhere like Harvard? I get the feeling it would devalue some of the perks of a Harvard education to accept on merit, when a lot of the students from low income backgrounds find the value in mixing with the legacy students.
Works well, doesn't really devalue the prestige of the uni or the students who get in by paying like some of the sibling comments are speculating.
> Works well, doesn't really devalue the prestige of the uni or the students who get in by paying like some of the sibling comments are speculating.
Not sure which part of India you lived in but private engineering schools like Manipal, SRM, Vellore aren't considered prestigious. BITS is the only private one which has good clout but they don't have any management quotas.
https://google.com/search?q=harvard+legacy
Other private schools are no different.
With the current setup, there are consequences to trying to pay your way in if you're caught. What's the point of removing those consequences?
This would replace that with cash on the barrel, which is simpler and more honest.
I'm not convinced it's better, but that would be the point of so doing.
But this has how it has always been. Everyone knew it was always like this, had a feeling it was like this while they were considering or going through higher education, and now a couple articles and investigations come out.
Is anyone surprised here?
The only thing that has occurred is that people covet these institutions and also think they have a chance of accessing them, thanks to illusions of meritocracy that become real enough to be meaningful avenues for a wider population than before.
In the past it was very clear who didn't have a chance and who did.
Look at the example applicants in the article! A babysitter who knew reality and took a chance they got - babysit with this connected family and ask for the favor. DUH! Ka-CHING! Even dropping out of that kind of university looks good. Life upgraded. What game are the rest of you all even playing?
A certain percentage of places are designated 'Management Quota', i.e., the management is free to do with them as it wishes. They are used in many ways. For example, if a certain religious community/sect/order runs the place, it may set aside a large chunk of the management quota to admit students from its community/sect/order; if a (non-sectarian) charitable trust runs the place, as is very common, it may set aside some percentage of the management quota for indigent students who would otherwise not had the chance to attend the institution. Additionally, almost invariably, some part of the management quota is sold to the highest bidder in a pure cash transaction. In this way, rich students end up subsidizing a reasonable number of otherwise deserving students.
There is a significant number of (relatively much less deserving) candidates that all institutions (private or public) are required to admit, such as those coming from the so-called "Scheduled Castes", "Scheduled Tribes", "Other Backward Classes" (from communities that have been lagging in privilege and access to economic opportunities because of their caste/religion), and candidates that have done most of their prior schooling in (massively underserved) rural areas (IOTW, "Reservation" aka Affirmative Action candidates). In fact, the chunk of places allotted (by Government Order) to Affirmative Action candidates is much larger than Management Quota, and even 'Merit Quota' (i.e., candidates who sit competitive examinations in order to gain admission).
As far as subsequent success is concerned, though, it's sink-or-swim for all the candidates who are admitted: they are not given any preference in tests, exams, etc. In some specific cases, for a small initial period, affirmative action candidates may be allowed to advance with lower scores, but that is very much a small exception, not the norm.
Generally, in polite conversation, no one ever talks about the other person's caste. A lot of the time, this is unnecessary, though. There are tons of caste signifiers, such as your last name, your skin tone, your language (both speakers can use the same language but the set of words used and usage/abusage can tell you a lot about the person's background. Like how you could tell a cockney from an upper-crust West Londoner.) Don't even get me started on food. If you are a "pure vegetarian", then it's a very good chance you are high-caste. With the professions also, things are changing a bit more quickly, but age-old divisions remain. You would be hard-pressed to find a Brahmin working a construction site (there's a good chance a Brahmin would be in an air-conditioned office drawing up the plans for said site); almost zero chance you'd see an upper-caste person going out fishing to sell the catch and make a living, and so on.
If you participate in a conversation with a group of Indians who have just met (at the workplace, say), just observe how they interact: they will put out direct or subtle questions like: "Where are you from originally?", "Where did you attend college?", "What do your parents do?", "Are you vegetarian or non-vegetarian?"... It just goes on and on. You can tell a lot about a person within 15 minutes of meeting him, if you have been raised in India.
EDIT: BTW, the terms "Scheduled Caste", "Scheduled Tribe" (perhaps even "Other Backward Classes") were introduced by the British! The British bureaucrats who ruled the country had an obsession with making tidy lists to categorise people (hence the "Schedule" in "Scheduled"!) and came up with the (original) lists of these castes and tribes!
Suppose that instead the auction was only open to people who got put on the wait list after the regular admissions process?
Top schools get a lot more qualified applicants than they have openings for, and a lot of people end up on the wait list who are just as qualified as people who were admitted.
https://google.com/search?q=harvard+legacy
Other private schools are no different.
This would theoretically lead to college degrees representing what they claim to represent (skill of an individual at graduation, not at their junior year of High School), would solve most of the cost issue (self studying and taking the exam would be a viable option that wouldn't be penalized), and admittance would be much less important (since it'd be disconnected from credentials). Of course it would also defang the leverage universities currently hold over society, so I imagine they'd fight tooth and nail against it.
Nobody is complaining about fairness or that it happens, let it happen but be open and honest about these transactions so other market participants can behave accordingly.
These universities also provide valuable networking opportunities. Would it be appropriate to completely segregate the pots so that they couldn't network?
And it probably differs from school to school -- depending on what the goal of the school is.
The entire sub-part of UC admissions having to do with top 9% of students (by school) being guaranteed admission is an effort to achieve racial diversity without calling it that and violating the law.
See page 9 and 21 of the UC's admissions materials. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/file...
See any of a number of sources, such as this one which a quick search turned up: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/learning/lesson-plans/sti...
Well, if Cal has one - it's not one that it can target through changing admission practices.
The entire sub-part of UC admissions having to do with top 9% of students (by school) being guaranteed admission is an effort to achieve racial diversity without calling it that and violating the law.
See page 9 and 21 of the UC's admissions materials. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/file...
I don't have a moral problem with this. It's not a good strategy in life to voluntary switch to a poorer performing school to give yourself a leg up in UC admissions while taking the cost of having less academically competitive high school classmates. It is a reasonable metric to view students through the lens of "how much have they accomplished given the opportunities afforded to them" -- the issue with something like Prop 16 is that it engages in statistical racial discrimination (mostly against racial minorities for that matter) to make that consideration.
Much like doping in sports, you have two paths you can take: try to combat cheating, or accept the cheating as part of the game.
I think these universities should accept that they are providing an education, but they are selling prestige, and split their admissions into two pots: people who pay their way in and the other who earns it. And they announce ahead of time what the size of each bucket is. When you apply, you chose which path you will take and that's it, you're stuck.
The people who choose the merit path take the standard entry exams, have their grades review, etc. And the ones who do the best get in. Those who choose to pay for admission participate in a silent auction, and those willing to pay the most are admitted.
This system isn't "fair", but the outcome is effectively the same as our current setup. With the most notable difference being that, at least this system is transparent and acknowledges that X% of incoming students paid for their post.