Caltech requires good grades as criteria for admission. Caltech graduates have a disproportionately high percentage of Nobel prizes.
https://www.caltech.edu/about/legacy/awards-and-honors/nobel...
BTW, I think the mRNA vaccine technology is worthy of a Nobel Prize. Don't you?
Edit: The Biontech founder comes from a turkish family, I don't. But I see that happening a lot, first during my school days. And now at my children's schools.
And given that people leave high school barely capable of reading newspaper articles (otherwise Breitbart or the Daily Mail would even be a thing), I don’t see what this selection is for.
Except of course for the founders of BoiNTech: Uğur Şahin, and Özlem Türeci.
Included to the point they got German government-funded PhDs and then other native Germans helped co-found their company.
Perhaps you hypothesis needs more data and less feelings?
Unless, of course, you buy into all that dishwasher to millionaire you can achieve anything if you want but don't expect a helping hand BS.
Caltech requires 10-year-old kids to write essays?
Again, are we talking about enrolling 10-year-old kids in highschool or are we talking about hiring microbiologists?
Second, people don't suddenly learn how to write a competent essay at the last minute. Writing a good one is a combination of many skills learned over many years.
BTW, I did not take any college prep courses prior to Caltech, and found myself way behind the other freshman who did. I found out many years later that the admissions committee had taken a chance on me, and they were very nearly wrong. I came that close to flunking out.
If public schools dump their gifted tracks, inequality will only increase as the top schools will wind up drawing only from private schools.
Anyway, so you should not have been admitted but you succeeded anyway without being a gifted kid? It seems like you have proved my point.
> No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Do we have any data on the correlation between high-school admission criteria and inventing the Covid vaccine or whatever?
We are not talking about taking advantage of excellence, which starts to become visible after highschool. We are talking about 10-year-olds who go to school to be taught the fundamental theorem of arithmetics.
> Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can. > The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
I don't know what the communists and the nazists have to do with changing the admission criteria of a high school. I suppose it's a way of expressing disagreement in American English?