More money gets you a voice in hiring committees where you can set the tone of the department and shape political discourse. The Koch brothers (those people again) did that very successfully with George Mason University when they transformed what was a commuter college into a megaphone for libertarian ideas.
There is also a flip side to this coin, which is why universities usually call this the “development” office.
If you are going to give money away, you are very likely to give it to an organization to which you have some sort of affinity to. Universities are actively trying to cultivate that affinity so they can capture some or all of your charitable spending. And they really, really don’t want any donor to know how much they’ve been manipulated. Many people really believe that their child earned their admission letter based on merit.
A lesson that generalizes well. Remember Occupy Wall Street, Piketty's tome, the Bernie primaries? It all feels like distant history now.
Occupy Wall Street had participants that counted at most 30,000 cumulatively across demonstrations in NY and surrounding areas. Impressive number? Not in my opinion.
Admittedly, I have no idea what the hell 'Piketty's tome' is, so I won't talk about it, seems like its related to a few books that sold 1.5m copies, pretty successful, that's it from me for now though.
Bernie in 2016 received ~43% of the vote in democratic primaries, in 2020 he slipped down to ~26%, neither times was he close. Hillary received ~55% in 2016, Joe received ~51% in 2020. Opinion polls consistently put Hillary far above Bernie throughout the entire election season. In 2020, Joe also had the highest approval rating amongst candidates in DNC, only dropping for a few weeks where admittedly Bernie had higher approval, but then dropped it when it really mattered.
So you'll have to point to me where exactly these people are popular, maybe within their own world? Maybe by spending? That only works for Bernie, not for Occupy Wall Street which was a very minor event by all measures. Can't speak to Picketty, so I will leave that undecided on my end, and let you define it's success.
Note, I am far from a Democrat or a Socialist, in fact I'm Republican through and through.
And Bernie is a great example because identity politics was specifically used against him; his supporters were derided as mostly white male "Bernie Bros".
Sounds like exactly what GP was talking about: steering conversations to race and sex to avoid talking about economic inequality.
And the abiding irony of that was that most of the people who did that supported Elizabeth Warren, who had vanishingly little support from actual minorities. She finished behind Tom Steyer in South Carolina and behind Mayor Pete in Nevada (states where the democratic base is heavily black and hispanic, respectively).
Even the New York Times acknowledged that Warren's campaign was a "demographic cul-de-sac" dominated by "college-educated white people." And those people had the gall to paint Bernie--who has invested enormous time and energy in reaching out to Hispanics and did well among that group--as racist.
I would argue, however, that he faced tremendous opposition from the wealthy, and that translated into most corporate media either attacking him or ignoring him, so his supporters could only be heard on social media.
Corporate opposition is a just-so story. Until his campaign fell apart, Sanders stomped Biden in earned media coverage.
What isn't popular among voters, by contrast, is the woke managerialism lane Warren has come to represent. That's significant both because it points to how the party should recalibrate its message, and also because of its implications for the party's management structure (where the woke managerialists have outsize power). I suspect Democrats' reshuffling of the primaries will significantly ameliorate both problems.
I'm not a Warren fan either. I'm the weirdo in this conversation who was actually rooting for Biden.
That being said he was probably the only person who could’ve stopped the union workers in Ohio from flipping to Trump.
> And Bernie is a great example because identity politics was specifically used against him; his supporters were derided as mostly white male "Bernie Bros".
Really? I thought "Bernie Bros" were deemed the 'working class' as proclaimed by Bernie style 'Socialists' that model their economic ideals based on a fictional EU. This seems like it's rewriting history.
> Sounds like exactly what GP was talking about: steering conversations to race and sex to avoid talking about economic inequality.
Sure, which is what you did, on your own, through your own comment, I talked about popularity, you're in some weird area where you are vaguely on the same topic as I am but pretending like it is towards the point.
Bernie had no shot. Both times. If he runs again in 2024, which will be hilarious if he does, it will simply be to raise money for the DNC, just like he did the last 2 times. No refunds. Look at that, did not mention a single demographic other than 'he' in these short 2 sentences, maybe you're onto something with 'Bernie Bros'.
"Robinson Meyer, a writer for The Atlantic, coined the term Bernie bro in an October 17, 2015 article to describe young, white, progressive men who, in his view, support unrealistic progressive policies"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Bro
And if you think this is all off topic, you must have missed this quote from the root of this thread:
> U.S. colleges have been carefully steering conversations about admissions in the direction of racial quotas, to avoid talking about how by far the largest driver of unfairness in the admissions process is legacy admissions and donation quid pro quo arrangements.
Piketty is an economist who wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which is a book on economics and wealth inequality (essentially arguing that the rich are inevitably going to get richer absent government intervention).
I mean, I do think that students getting in because daddy gives a couple million isn't the end of the world.
The college I went to 20 years ago went away from need-blind admissions, which basically meant if you can pay you get some preference. Now THAT was bad, because it affected the general student population. If instead you have a reserved number of "bribe" students and that means pure-merit admissions can be done with the rest of the students, well, ok.
I love how admissions of athletes to play sports gets a total pass. Probably because it putatively is a good means for minorities to get into schools, even if they are separated off into purely sports training tracks and joke academics.
The real issue is the MBAs running the colleges as a profit industry. Except there's no profits, so they pay... themselves.
And sadly, even if they succeed on this track into the world of professional sports, the joke academics and lack of financial training (if you had a financial education you would never play college sports anyway...) mean that they're set up to go broke and fail in life as soon as the injuries add up or their athletic ability is no longer exceptional to their peer group.
Let’s not pretend all those legacies are showing up to class and working hard.
From my personal experiences, I suspect the restriction of financial aid based on arbitrary cutoffs affects more people. I know several people who got into ivys, but didn't go because they didn't qualify for financial aid and chose not to take on large amounts of debt, coming from frugal lower/middle class families.
(As an aside: as an advisor of PhD students in computer science, I sometimes have to train students out of these habits. Research doesn’t happen if you’re used to getting the shallow answer more quickly, or if you’re afraid to be wrong.)
You seem to be coming from the perspective that testing must be the best metric, and then trying to develop a methodology based on that assumption. Purely as a thought exercise: it might be helpful to start from the assumption that testing isn’t an option, and think about what you might do instead.
Any student that can do any sort of undergrad level math like AP Calculus is going to find SAT math trivial in comparison. There's no way you can pass exams in the first but do poorly on SAT math, since all the stuff SAT math is testing on are prereqs for something like calculus.
At that time, the SAT was good at predicting the likely performance of a prospective college student … for one term. That’s it. I got an excellent score on my SAT (not a perfect score, but I thought that it was a bullshit measure — which, like all standardized testing, it is — so I didn’t care). I did well in my first term, and then not so well after that (I ended up doing fine in the end, but it took longer to get through a degree program because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up; I think that Americans, by and large, put too much focus on going to university too early and we would be better served by an extra year of high school and/or a gap year).
One other thing I remember from that time period is that a better predictor of overall success in school was NOBITH, the Number Of Bathrooms In The House. That is, socioeconomic indicators were a better predictor than anything else, including nonsense standardized tests like the SAT. And given that socioeconomic indicators are a better indicator, that is a strong indication that there’s seriously wasted potential at all levels of eduction because we mistakenly equate family socioeconomics with success in general.
Weighted GPA * 1000 + SAT Score + SAT II English + SAT II Math + max(remaining SAT II scores)
They would then just keep admitting people until they hit 5000 offers.
Then they got accused of racism because that process ended up overweighting Whites and Asians compared to the applicant pool for all the top schools.
There is/was a lot of debate on why Whites and Asians did better, but when you dug in it turned out they tended to almost all be upper-middle class or wealthy. So basically it was wealth and systemic racism, masked by "standardized testing".
Also it should be noted that wealthy people had a better chance at a higher weighted GPA because their schools offered more AP courses.
Is admitting the most capable students unfair? It is inherently discriminatory based on their knowledge and ability, which seems is what people want, but it also means that having more resources to be better equipped aka better nurture, which tends to positively influence individual's prospects, is suddenly something many are not okay with?
Obviously, the SAT tests are flawed one way or another. But then again, they don't care for students' superficial characteristics.
If not that, then implied statement is very reminiscent to slogans used in USSR or during cultural revolution in China.
Are they actually the most capable students, or did they just have a better chance of getting higher scores on the arbitrary metrics chosen? And if so, why did they have a higher chance?
There is a difference between better nurture and lack of opportunity. It's true, we shouldn't be correcting for lack of opportunity at the college admissions level, we should be doing it at the elementary level and younger.
But it's a lot easier to correct it at the college admissions level, which is a good choke point in one's life path, so for now, that is where the focus is.
Further, why should colleges try to correct for lack of opportunity? Their job is to educate people, and not everyone is apt for higher education. Admitting a student with poor mathematical abilities into a rigorous engineering program is just setting that student up for failure, not recompensing him for opportunities lost or squandered earlier.
Public schools should do it because they are part of the education system that needs correction.
Private schools arguably are still part of the public education system since they all get Federal dollars, and thus the same argument applies.
If they're getting tax dollars, that makes them a public good, and therefore they should be doing things that help all people, not just some people.
A student who goes to a poor school who offers zero AP classes will always achieve lower weighted GPAs than students who go to wealthy schools that offer many AP classes. No amount of individual achievement will overcome that mathematical disadvatnage.
Racism comes into when, because of racism, it just so happens that schools who are well funded and can give that advantage are overwhelmingly white, and schools who are are poorly funded and cannot give that advantage are overwhelmingly non-white.
Suggesting that a student who is "placed above his or her station" into an elite program is setup for failure is a favorite of a few SCOTUS Justices, but in fact is not supported by evidence. Graduation and other metrics of success are not strongly correlated to past attainment, primarily because most programs have already had to deal with achievement inequities, and the most successful programs already have mechanisms to even out unequal prior achievement. Virtually all programs that have elite programs already have a substantial apparatus dedicated to filling achievement gaps between incoming students.
The larger question of "what is the purpose of college" and "is it to educate people" is bigger than this thread, but shouldn't be overlooked. For schools that are publicly funded in whole or part, there should be a larger mission than sending young adults through an educational meat grinder. The public mission of public universities should absolutely have a social justice component.
There is absolutely no doubt that we could design an education system which, at an early age, divides and tracks students towards a successful and high level of attainment. By ruthlessly focusing resources on those children with the best chances of success, and minimizing resources expended on those with lower changes of success, the system could produce many multiples of positive outcomes than we do now, but at the cost of many more left with almost no attainment. Our present distribution of resources, in the US, is haphazardly assembled and produces a balance of outcomes, but is by no means optimized for any particular set of outcomes.
However, the downside to "solving" this is significantly worse. By giving a headstart to students based on their superficial or socioeconomical characteristics creates perverse incentives in the system and disconnects it from a selection process.
Usually, countries that are not US solve this by providing free tutorships or lectures to aspiring students, scholarships and a fixed quota of free placements in the admission for top performing students (each country may have their own flavour of the policy, but the main thing they !fortunately! did not use to be based on race or gender).
It is usually much better, in my personal opinion, to provide the "help" to those who seek it rather than trying to equalize for outcome. Poor upbringing can and usually does damage and incapacitates individuals to an extent. But any movement among the lines of "not having issues or being better prepared means you have to do more work" explicitly discourages the optimal behaviour, incentivizing victim-hood and demoralizes individuals which did use the opportunities available to them or managed to create ones.
Again, and I cannot stress this enough, communism is bad.
> Again, and I cannot stress this enough, communism is bad.
Again I agree with you. But I'm not sure how that's relevant. Changing the way we do college admissions isn't communism.
In fact, admitting students purely based on test scores is something that happens in communist countries.
They are the most capable. You call them abitrary, without stating what makes them arbitrary. Until you prove they're arbitrary, your opinion isn't worth addressing.
Standardized testing isn’t perfectly meritocratic, but everything else is worse.
As a side note, I haven’t found any more detailed breakdown of the personality scoring results. Asia is a very diverse place and Asian ethnic groups in the US range from the very richest to some of the poorest.
For example, Harvard could simply auction off their seats. That’s transparent at least, if not exactly fair.
Or maybe alternative is truly random or negative wealth scoring. That is only the poorest students get entry and everyone else will have to figure out something else.
Grades and standardized test scores might be one of the least interesting and almost definitely one of the less effective ways to classify the “most capable” students.
If I’m optimizing for students who do cool stuff, force marching them into relatively banal optimization tasks is counterproductive.
With that said, I think modern education system can no longer scale and has outlived its usefulness. The future is with LLM-driven tutors which can somewhat alleviate the scaling issues inherent to "apprenticeship". Personally, as an ADHD individual it was always drastically easier to study under a person who gives you dedicated attention that for any of my peers. By a wide margin. And yet, studying for local SAT equivalent was an insurmountable task involving acquiring a lot of knowledge and skills that were useless outside of passing the test.
It would be more constructive to improve teacher education, wages, and standards to create a more productive and better resourced education system.
You could look to countries such as Finland et al for a model rather than drawing upon satirical dystopian ankle deep in thought Harrison Bergeron scenarios.
My understanding is that Brown basically does that. This would sort of back that up:
It would also put a ton of pressure on high school students to get perfect scores, creating a ton more stress than they already have. And at the expense of much more valuable things they could be doing with their time.
The current system has issues, but there are worse ways to do things.
The number of high school or undergrads who wrote groundbreaking biology papers is vanishingly small, but you do raise a good point. There’s a chicken and egg problem. Because schools aren’t just weighting test scores (because the score is flawed) there is incentive to work on other, more subjective things.
That’s tricky. In a massive country with many incredible students, it seems to me that it’s going to be possible for the top .1% of students to do as well as is possible on any reasonable exam.
Do you disagree?
If wealth is the ultimate playground for everything (capitalism?), then obviously the elite institutions are playing the right game.
There might be natural reasons for that but there were also clearly some perverse effects: because those exams became effectively competitive exams (fixed number of seats available), they require intense preparation in preparatory schools which became the educational equivalent of a 2-3y navy seal bootcamp (it's not enough to have good grades, you need the best grades). Teachers in poor area high schools were often unfamiliar and intimidated by this system (they didn't go through it themselves), and were actively discouraging good students to take that path. Students not having educated parents who knew the system were not pushed to work really hard to get into, and survive that system either. And you ended up with 80%-90% of the kids in those colleges coming from families from similar colleges. Money wouldn't be a major factor, the top colleges and preparatory schools are free.
Now the natural ratio shouldn't be 3-5% (elite college educated parent as % of general population), probably around 50-60%, certainly not 80-90%.
For the past 15y, France has opted to break the thermometer instead, ie to bypass those exams for the majority of the recruitment, and to select students on file which grants them full latitude for subjectivity. I suspect they also nationalised the selection process of those preparatory schools (not super familiar with the latest developments). I think the main consequence is that those elite colleges will quickly lose their prestige, and it might actually be the unstated intention, i.e. converge to a german like education system where the name and prestige of the university matters little vs the profile of the student.
It might be a good thing or perhaps it will just ruin the french educational system, it's hard to tell.
And for anyone who thinks it's unfair: not anymore so than the parent lottery. And I think institutional acknowledgment of the role pure dumb luck plays in our lives would go a long way towards dispelling our inclination to actively punish people for acts of the cosmos and/or dysfunctional policy.
This reminded me of something back when I was in high school in my Latin American country. There used to be this locally known international university-application-consultant and one of the things he mentioned for the "satisfaction guaranteed" of his services was being familiar on which Universities needed to increase their Latin American demographics and how to use that in the applicant's favor to increase the chances of a successful college and scholarship application. This was mostly targeted to students at bilingual or international schools whose families were already wealthier than average.
> shared the same life experiences regardless of their race
Where I grew up bilingual/international school students live in an isolated bubble separate from the rest of students. So they grow up with the study plans, standardized tests, music, tv shows and pop culture from their international school's country.
So probably that's why their life experience might have been more similar to those in the U.S. This is only a small fraction of the students though.
For example a high school student from American School of my country might know about the SAT test prep, Ivy applications, college application essay writing, and be familiar with US issues. All of those which would be mostly unknown by students outside that circle. Making others less likely to successfully apply.
It's possible that race simply has more charge than class does, regardless of the axiomatic arguments people have for why it should be the other way around.
Clearly there is a large constituency for class-oriented progressivism. Sanders wouldn't have been able to win California, Nevada, and Colorado, and hold his own in Texas, otherwise. What Warren proves is that adding identity politics to the mix is a losing proposition, even in the Democratic Party.
Expect colleges to fight this much, much harder than they ever did for anything related to affirmative action, because this is actually hitting them where it hurts.