Basically, whatever thing you choose as the metric, people with more resources and information will be able to optimize for it better. However, the more difficult the metric becomes to achieve, the more it benefits those who already benefit from the resource and information asymmetry.
I almost can't think of something more middle-class than an aggressive dedication to as many extra-curricular activities as possible. SUVs full of children being driven from baseball to ballet to swimming? Seems a common part of culture for the middle-class?
And those SUVs require parents (usually moms) with the free time to do all that driving and managing.
Every admission system prides itself in being the best but they all ultimately end up getting gamified. Because there is too much at stake.
Job interviews would benefit from the same thing, to go by the self-reported amount of time wasted on leetcode around here.
Rewarding people for simply being born with high IQ is the opposite of meritocratic.
To steal another idea from the job interview discussions: what you want might be entry-level intro survey type classes that are broadly open to lots of people (maybe online) but have a high bar for completion to gain full admission, and focus on some of the hands-on aspects of the field in question. "Lower bar + weed out courses" is used in a lot of places that couldn't get away with the high bar of MIT or such.
Alternately, I often suspect the best solution would be fully randomized admissions. Does it make sense to stratify by institution, so that you have one single gate into university, instead of looking at the output of four years of work across mostly-evenly-distributed places? Where you can more legitimately assume that what someone gets out of their time will be the result of what they personally put into it?
Read Young's original book coining the term: it was both a satire and dystopian lament. Far from a term of approval!
Certainly many people -- perhaps most -- believe that "IQ" (loosely defined) is in fact the proper definition of meritocracy.
(In case it's not obviously I definitely disagree)
It's all well and good if you're smart because it increases your advantage two-fold. But it basically screws over everyone else.
Having lived in the US for a decade now, one of the biggest culture gap I keep and that probably won't ever go away is how it's somewhat accepted here that "letting rich kids cheat/buy their way into Ivy League is not that bad, and look it pays for a new cafeteria".
What I'm going for is more the idea that if you consider the best alternative I can think of to the "holistic" approach, you get selecting applicants purely based on entrance exam scores. In such a world you'd be punishing a kid who plays with Arduino out of interest. Any energy devoted towards something other than test prep is energy wasted.
In the American system, as I'm coming to see it, the kid who plays with Arduino is punished less. The test won't take you all the way anyways, and you even get a little "refund" on attention sunk into some types of activity which qualify as extracurricular.
For course selection too. You'll have students picking out classes because they are known to be easy and not because they are curious about it. Because they have to keep their GPA at a certain level.
What a truly stunning coincidence indeed.
There's a percentage of admitted students at which it's interesting to admit based on donations. Especially if one large donation can make need-blind admission possible for N students. But do it too much and you'll become a school that's known as "pay to win".
> (our "preparatory classes" system also has similar high competitiveness/high pressure characteristics, to prepare for a few deciding exams
There's also a third hidden option. The Polytechnique in Montreal is notorious for this: admit too much, collect tuition and then have students transfer out when they can't handle the workload.
Learning how the world works, apparently :(
This is why Stanford and Harvard are far more popular and recognizable compared to Caltech and MIT even though the quality of the students is virtually identical.
if you work in admissions as a place like Harvard or Stanford they will tell you point blank they make those kinds of "sentiment" considerations. I'm personally not a fan, but I get it.
I also think it's even arguable that MIT has more prestige than Harvard - of course this will depend how you're defining prestige, but people definitely assume high intelligence when they hear a student goes to MIT in a way they don't for Harvard. Which I have to imagine is at least somewhat explainable by the admissions differences.
Caltech is a much smaller school and is maybe a better example of a school that's underrated by people who don't know better? But for any reasons that prestige would actually matter I doubt Caltech students have any problems either.
Citation Needed.
Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, the LSE, Sciences Pos, X, ÉNA are all counter examples. You can select purely on academics just fine.
Obviously the people involved in the process were generally ethically minded but if this thread shows anything, it’s that two people may do quite different things while each trying to act ethically.
Actually, most of adult working life is already like that: there's many potential job interviews, projects that you can compete to various level of success, etc. The "single test" typically only exists in systems of higher education.
And this might be getting a little personal, but just read that person's username. Acharya is a common Brahmin title, so I'm not very surprised that he thinks this way.
To be perfectly clear, I don't dispute ability exists - I just don't think that should be the ideal organizing philosophy for society.
I also have some doubts about meritocracy for a couple of reasons:
1) Although we can try very hard to be objective, at the end of the day everything is subjective
2) So called "merit" seems to be largely based on genetic traits (Intelligence, personality, physical, etc)
I'm genuinely asking because I have no clue what people want "merit" to mean. I always assumed the entire point was to remove environmental factors (to varying degrees).
I don't know what merit should really mean though. It seems like there will always be some sort of hierarchy in society, so I guess defining what constitutes merit is a pick-your-poison kind of situation.
I'm a failure by meritocracy by nature of losing at all of the tests we use to judge success and merit - test scores, elite school admission, elite institutions etc.
But if you tie a person’s social status to performance on a single test, you suffocate all the useful things people could be doing if they didn’t have to solely dedicate themselves to prep. So maybe we’re doing okay as-is.