My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to compete for the non reserved seats.

The point is you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge.

Does India have something like SAT as well?

This seems just as unhelpful for deciding who to hire or who to allow onto a higher course of study as the campaigns we have seen on some USA university campuses to give all students an automatic A grade.

Note that the system also has many holes, so the categorization isn't perfect. Its possible for a large number of students to belong to the categories only on paper. So you don't even get equity in the end.

Unless you have some specific knowledge that the child insisted on their parents taking the action, it’s not really fair to blame the child. A lot of children don’t have much choice in the matter at that age.

They would consider it smart to game the system.

Only way I can explain this attitude is to compare it tax loopholes in the west. It is very hard for many Americans to see loopholes in tax codes as unethical. Like using mega-backdoor-ira loophole to bypass income limits for contributing to IRA. (Personally, I am not saying that tax loopholes are ethical or unethical, just something that can be seen both ways.)

And unlike EU, this benefits corporates/capitalism as they can cut through the red tape easily by "gaming" things.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33368104

That's why you have to look at total wealth, not just income... though I'm sure the ultra wealthy will find some way to work around that as well.

If it's a small handful of people, there's probably better things for them to spend time on, rather than trying to make an unbeatable system.

Okay, well this is the US.

Your tax returns are a very good indication of how much money you make.

If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.

When I applied for grad school many admission documents explicitly asked about this, even outside the realm of financial assistance.

Moreover I'd expect that any given user w/10mm would be rolling into multiple accounts to maximize protection offered by FDIC.

If you own a large amount of equities you can get a secured loan on those holdings and use it to pay your bills while taking zero salary. This allows folks to live fancy lifestyles without selling holdings and triggering capital gains:

* https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/13/portfolio-loans-can-be-one-w...

The loan is not counted as income.

At most US elite schools, less than 20 percent is for “non-reserved” seats. Elite schools reserve seats for sports teams (affirmative action for rich white elites with “sports” like fencing and rowing), legacies (affirmative action for rich white elites), related to professors and school administrators (affirmative action for rich white elites), those who write essays on poverty tourism and their work experience in the NGO/white savior/charity scams (rich white elites), and then regular affirmative action (capped at 20%].

So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.

I just realized that there are more Appalachians in America than Asian Americans. But how many people have you run into in an elite school with an Appalachian accent? (Or a southern or mid-atlantic, or other lower-tier white accent?)

Maybe the redneck culture of poor Appalachian people is less sticky than the redneck culture of many poor Blacks in the US. My personal anecdotes support that, but then selection bias means they necessarily must.

When I run into guys at work with heavy Appalachian accents, they tend to be heavy machinery mechanics. That's also where I find Black guys who cling to a large amount of Black redneck culture. And those two groups together comprise the supermajority of heavy machinery mechanics at work, come to think of it.

Source: I spent my entire childhood on counties adjacent to what is considered 'Appalachia', and I went to a higher-end college with a significant affirmative action focus on geographic distribution around the US.

Even the SAT score can be gamed.[3] I think pretty much every admissions advantage that exists is found and exploited. These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead. They are credential factories and students who go these schools have parents that push them from young ages to get in because they want the status credential. I have all sorts of stories about how fake a lot of students CVs are. Fake non profits, doing math competitions despite not liking math, getting into obscure sports, etc. It's absolutely not just white people who do this.

I am not advocating for dropping test scores. I just want to point out how aggressively people pursue getting admitted to elite schools and the specter of cheating hangs over it all too. I have friends who did tutoring in other countries who talk about paid SAT test takers.

[1]: https://gocrimson.com/sports/mens-fencing/roster

[2]: https://goprincetontigers.com/sports/mens-squash/roster?path...

[3]: https://qz.com/980074/the-sat-can-be-hacked-and-gamed-with-t...

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/8/2025-freshman-su...

I don't know if whites are generally the beneficiary of student athletic admissions policies at all elite schools although it is complicated because of things like decades old sports from before diversity was a concern and team size. I don't see Harvard cutting long successful teams just to appease non white people but then again they probably would. Also things like the men's football team have a very large roster of 100+ people.

[1]: https://stanforddaily.com/2020/09/27/varsity-cuts-challengin...

This is the arbitrage opportunity for lower-ability legacy students. If the schools provided elite educations, they would chew up and spit out lazy rich kids (and probably generate parental acrimony toward the schools in the process, weakening the donor connections.) As affirmative action of all shapes and sizes creates an ever-expanding group of people most likely to fail who the school is particularly determined to not flunk, there is more safe space for deadweight rich kids (which, for the record, I suspect is an overplayed trope relative to actual prevalance, though probably not hard to find at top-ranked schools.)

Is that generally true or is that a stereotype?

Legacy students also had a higher average SAT score than non-legacy students, at 1523 for legacy students and 1491 for non-legacy students.[1]

[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/8/2025-freshman-su...

Now, a few guesses: first, to the extent that affirmative action is even partially successful in targeting disadvantaged groups, affirmative action students should be less likely to be legacy, meaning that applications of legacy students should at least reflect a numerical superiority consistent with the strength of the affirmative action bias. Second, I will say that from personal experience I valued, more highly than was deserved, the schools that my parents attended; in this way those schools were the beneficiaries of highly effective advertising, through my parents, that made me more focused on those particular schools than they deserved (so much so that two of the three were two of the four schools I intended to apply to.) The aggregate outcome of that effect across all legacy applicants should be a higher-than-usual applicant quality in the pool of legacy students.

Would the legacies tend to have much higher income, or is any old person who's a child of an alumnus considered a legacy?

Now that I have kids at in private school, I have a totally different perception of the cultural capital these families have that we didn't. We have a second winter break for ski holiday. My daughter asked me why we don't ever go to Aspen. When we were kids, we didn't know anyone, we didn't know what to write in admissions essays. We had enough money to do test prep, but that's incredibly cheap in comparison. I'm not concerned about my kids if we move to a subjective admissions system. We'll send my daughter to Bangladesh to do some gold-star project and hire an admissions coach to wring my dad's story of growing up in a third world village for all its worth. But if I was a recent immigrant, or a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this.

Of course, no one cares about these kids (least of all the elites and their cadre), and any outrage from lower middle class Iowans is already explained away as racism (never mind that Iowa, like much of the rest of middle America, went to Obama in 2008 and 2012).

Predictable yet still disappointing.

It may be worth mentioning that one of the, if not the, most powerful IP lawyers in the Bay Area is “only” a University of Iowa Law School grad.

https://www.quinnemanuel.com/attorneys/verhoeven-charles-k/#...

It is that we know that going to places like Harvard, you are much, much more likely to have a well-paying job, comparatively. Bonus points if you are rich and can do things more often with your peers. I'm not under the impression that the education is that much better (it might be, I can't assess that). The networking you definitely seems better. You are getting a foot in the door, a thing that poor families can't always get without a good dose of luck.

(The trouble, of course, is with career paths in which networking and prestige matter a lot more.)

I suspect you're correct, though, that if Harvard closes those doors, talented people will go to the University of Iowa (my wife's alma mater) and do fine.

I wish the obsession with top-tier colleges would go away. It’s not hard to get into a public research university, where there always an opportunity to shine, even if the average student is, well, average.

The real tragedy here though is costs have gone up quite a bit for state educations and the true top-tier educations have so many scholarships available that an average education costs more than a premium one.

I went to a state school but have spent far more of my life working at and with people from Princeton, Caltech, Stanford, etc…

I do think it's true that Caltech students are all very passionate about STEM, so the average family wealth is less apparent.

Keep in mind that I attended in the 70s. Nothing stays the same. I have little idea if Caltech is the same today as then, and rather doubt it. One obvious change is their mission statement has changed drastically. In the 1978 "Caltech Information for Students" pg 105 it says simply:

> The primary purpose of the undergraduate school of the California Institute of Technology, as stated by the Trustees, is "to provide a collegiate education which will best train the creative type of scientist or engineer so urgently needed in our educational, governmental, and industrial development."

Late 60s, Page, for me. I was lower middle class, which seemed to be the great majority. I recall only one House contemporary who was from serious wealth. Would never have known but for developing a friendship. As you say, I doubt things are similar today.

Ideally, the people of the future will have progressed beyond the relative savagery of me and my peers and look upon us with disdain. Perhaps for how much I enjoy a good steak, or for the genital mutilation of our boys.

I can celebrate George Washington as a founder of the country and also understand he was a slave owner.

It turns out even Gandi, Mother Theresa, etc had a pretty sketchy side, because shocker no human actually meets that bar. But since we're categorically unable to say someone did a great thing while actually being pretty immoral by that's standards, the only options that the university seem to have available to it are entirely condoning their unacceptable side or else disowning them.

I'm not saying there couldn't be I don't know, a pet owner who took them in off the street or from a shelter, nursed them back to health, and are lifetime companions in a consensual idealised relationship, with the ownership mostly being a legal technicality. Yet there is an ethically dubious side to pet ownership which I could imagine getting the entire institution framed in a negative light in the distant future.

I imagine in the year 3000 there might be a future where schoolchildren will be shown holograms of rendering plants and told by the teacher "And this is what they fed the animals" and then a Labrador Retriever will have an AI write an essay which states that "the ownership or consumption of any animals, is fundamentally a crime against animal rights".

And yes. I think slaving/caging an animal is brutal. But many animals will happily have your company.

I was visiting Bay Area a year before COVID and stopped by in Berkeley for something, iirc was getting brunch with friends. The first thing I see after parking is a full street closure and a large crowd that looked like it was marching down the street, with people holding banners, drumming, chanting slogans, etc.

Out of curiosity, I decided to check what it was about. As you have probably guessed by now, "pet ownership is slavery" was the theme (one of the banners in the front was saying exactly that).

I guess all of human civilization has just been a giant failure. The only chance we have is for us poor wretches to retroactively flagellate our ancestors and beg forgiveness from the gods of modern enlightenment, complete with the knowledge that we too will be flagellated in our own due time, and rightfully abhorred in the judgement of future generations, no matter our worldly achievements.

For all its supposed enlightenment, modern political correctness is really more akin to medieval Catholicism

Yes, I even consider the Nazis terrible people no matter how widespread antisemitism was at the time and no matter how much public support they had. I have that view simultaneously with the understanding that there is no German my age who engaged in any of that.

There is nothing wrong with understanding and making moral judgements about people. I can look at a painting in a museum that has someone enslaved in the picture and both understand the context and be repulsed by the depiction.

It's proper for people to make moral judgements, and to understand both past injustices and contemporary injustices that one implicitly (one hopes not explicitly!) supports.

The real issue here is it’s hard to revise such emotionally charged views in light of new information. Condemn people for murder and it will be harder for you to notice the innocent person on death row.

Worse, many people will try and influence your opinion via misinformation. Condemnation short circuits peoples ability for rational though and that’s exactly how normal people end up committing atrocities.

But of course: isn't that the important lesson? Most, but not all were; so is this knowledge an excuse to do nothing or is it a spur to look for the injustices one accepts today, and change one's position?

Beware anybody or anyone who seeks to erase the messiness and complexity of life. The pursuit of purity is the root of so much evilness. If you uncover the sordid past of a public figure, the right thing to do is exhibit that history alongside the better things they're known for, so that people learn and remember what real people look like; that nobody is a caricature; and that to avoid repeating the sins of history we must appreciate what we share with those who have committed those sins previously.

Even in the 1990s, a CS program was easy to get into and a local 4 year degree was sufficient for most lines of work.

A friend of mine dropped out of Caltech after a couple years, and disappeared. I ran into him many years later, and we did some catching up. 10 years after dropping out, he asked Caltech if he could come back and try again. They said sure (one of the nice things about Caltech's philosophy). He got straight A's. I asked him if he had gotten any smarter, he said no, he was just willing to work the second time around.

Of course, there were some students who just effortlessly aced everything. Hal Finney (yes, that Hal) was one of them. Being around people like that was just amazing.

RIP. He probably say the same about you

I think this is true for a lot of engineering schools. Maybe there just isn't as much of a demand to go to the pure STEM schools as there is the schools that have everything. Like I remember looking at requirements for Rutgers at the same time and essentially they had like a 3.2 (or maybe 3.4 GPA) minimum and you'd have to re-take all the core CS classes as they would not accept those classes from community college.

For someone like me, who believed they could do it, but didn't have the "perfect" admissions packet (moving to the US midway through high school with very poor english and zero knowledge of how the US education/admission systems work will do that), it was the chance I needed, and I am immensely grateful for it.

I’m sure it’s still true today. Still, the incentive to game and coach through admissions is intense because of the potential rewards.

I went to my local 4 year which was nearly free, and I coasted through the CS program making it possible to do other things.

Still, my earnings were halved because of the lower quality of the CS program and I do wonder about the road not taken.

I think it’s even more intense for students today; but it’s also true that the quality of student hasn’t gone up.

> There are a lot of rich kids at the school

They must have hid it well, because I didn't notice any. I never heard anyone mention skiing in Aspen. Nobody had even an upper class car. Nobody had an expensively outfitted dorm room.

As for me, I come from a lower middle class family, and managed to get a modest loan in aid, which I paid off after graduation.

But the insiders can clearly tell you're not one of them.

However, the signals are more subtle than you think. Things like being happy to go out to eat on weekends, having a big wardrobe, having technical toys, and having a car (at all) were all signs of wealth. A few particular sports were also indicators. "Rich people cars" are usually not given to kids in their 20's, even by wealthy parents.

More subtly, there are a lot of social things, like asking what your parents do and asking about your last vacation. Most rich kids know how to read the room enough not to brag about expensive vacations directly, but will ask assuming you recently had one. Having parents who fly in for things and flying out for short vacations is a dead giveaway.

Also, at Caltech in particular, being well-read was a sign of wealth, but I assume that doesn't translate to non-science schools.

And it would never come up in rotation, but certain house cultures just are more attractive to certain types of people. I think that's the source of the disparity, not any sort of rotation-related thing.

I was well-read, at least in the field of scifi books!

I don't recall anyone's parents flying in or them flying out for vacations. You might see them dropping their kid off at the beginning of the year, or picking them up at the end.

I eventually got a car for my senior year, but it was my beater Mustang from high school I'd rescued from oblivion.

But, just because I didn't notice these things, doesn't mean they weren't there.

Until the ceiling of utility goes away the obsession wont go away.

If your goal is to climb the corporate ladder, all schools have nearly the same utility. Maybe industry specific, but I contend that its not different enough.

If your goal is to skip the corporate ladder, only top tier schools get you in the room. And only if the pedigree is used in very specific ways. Still not a silver bullet by any means.

But not being there is basically the same as having no ammunition.

Sure the elite schools matter because they control access to the levers of mass societal power but it seems to be a MAJORITY of what is talked about which seems disproportionate.

We've got this at my kid's public school. Neighboring school districts don't, but they have two weeks for spring break (Easter) and we have only one. So that works out for me, although I don't much want to go on a vacation that needs two weeks when everyone else is on vacation; it's no fun to go to fun places that are overcrowded.

https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-agai...

It’s happened in the past to Jewish people and it’s now happening with Asians. It’s routine to hear admissions officers say that Asians are boring.

If the end goal is to eliminate any sign of a meritocracy, they are well on their way to achieving it.

Aren't costs going up for everyone else anyway? Hot take: instead of hoping that rich alumni would donate to universities, the nation could tax these folks properly instead, and use that money make public education free/cheap.

There are quite a few countries in the world doing this, not all of them rich.

Or the universities could spend a bit less money. Most donations go to things that aren't exactly central to the supposed mission of a university, like football fields or $90 million dining halls [1]. The explosion of administrative staff over the last couple decades also doesn't help.

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/real-estate/2016/0...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/march-madness-is-a-moneymaker-m...

Look at the worth of theirs endowment funds at the end of 2021 :

  Harvard   53G$
  Yale      42G$
  Stanford  37.8G$
  Princeton 37G$
  MIT       27.4G$

All these unusual units are kinda fun, could spice up a presentation or conversation to throw in without context.

It gives me that hacker having fun, tarsnap picodollar/byte-month pricing vibe.

53G$ == $53B USD

I remember how during the pandemic there was a number of articles about how these schools might have to take out some small pittance of the endowment to fund certain things and the schools were all doom and gloom about it.

So no, endowments aren't spent, but the returns fund a lot of stuff.

Encouraging donation to top schools via legacy admission creates perverted incentives to concentrate resources at a few top schools, creating the cycle of everyone fighting to get into them. Money and resources should be spread out.

You still have a strong incentive for folks who want to show gratitude to their alma mater, and at the same time help improve access and equity to everyone else.

I think that's a joke of an argument. The people whose kids would no longer get in would go somewhere and the distribution of their bribery would surely be more democratizing.

LOL they don't need any more donations.

It would be interesting if there was a rule that forbid you from attending the same school as your parents.

So, a lot of restrictions and quotas were added to get these working-class children into universities. A couple of years after the first batch graduated the program was rolled back. Soviet scientists started to complain, because diversity and equity be damned, the quality of the graduates cratered. If you want to be able to rain nuclear fire on the USA, you need the best and the brightest working in your research institutes.

Learning disabilities give unlimited time on the tests. That means you can slowly use brute force on the math section to check each alternative one by one instead of needing to be good at other techniques.

Harvard had something like 25% of admitted students do this. Does it sound plausible that 25% of Harvard students need unlimited time on the test due to a learning disability and that lower tier schools have lower rates of learning disabilities, or more plausible that Harvard students have more access to sympathic doctors (through family relations, upper/upper midle class organization connections) and savvy admissions advisers?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/colleges-bend-the-rules-for-mor...

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/h...

Why is somebody deemed somebody to have a weakness in learning in one particular area that makes them “learning disabled”? Why aren’t students who just aren’t as smart as other students considered “learning disabled” and given extra time on tests? But if you’re called dyslexic or dysgraphic or have dyscalculia you’re disabled and deserve not just accommodations (Which I wouldn’t be opposed to) but extra time on every test even if on the whole you smoke the other students?

They are beyond questioning and any teacher who does is likely to have their heads chopped off for hating and not believing disabled people despite not being an expert in disability. Which pretends these accommodations were given out in the first place due to some rigorous criteria.

I can tell your frustrated with accommodations. I think your arguments against accommodations would be a lot stronger if you knew more about them. I think you might have some good points inside, but your frustration and ignorance prevent them from being compelling. I encourage you to do more reading, but let me point out a few mistakes in your post.

* You seem to mistakenly associate a learning disability with low intelligence. A person cannot have a learning disability and be below average in intelligence by definition. Struggling to learn how to read while being average or above average in every other subject is different than strugglingly to learn everything. The more a student struggles to learn to read while excelling at everything else, the more likely they are to be diagnosed. This means very intelligent students with a learning disability are more likely to be diagnosed than average students with the same disability.

* Extra time on test is an accommodation.

* Accommodations are not being handed out like candy for no reason. Anyone can buy candy. Accommodations require a documented disability.

* Many standardized test accommodations are very appropriate, such as blind people being offered a braille version of the test, or people with poor motor control having someone else physically fill in scantron bubbles.

* A student can be disabled based on low intelligence. It's not called a learning disability, because it's fundamentally a different thing.

I am not claiming that learning disabilities aren't real or that students who legitimately have those conditions don't deserve some accommodations. But the reality is that the current system is totally broken and discriminatory.

Not because I don't believe it but if these things are well known, why isn't some clickbait journalist all over it?

Very aware of this, which essentially means that learning disabilities are a privilege for kids who are ALREADY ADVANTAGED over the other students, and yet a child with a 120IQ and dysgraphia gets to take 50% more time on their test than a kid with 80IQ basically without question, and if they press the issue they can probably get double time. That's the entire issue.

You know, because that's fair. It's an "accommodation" for a student who has already gotten higher grades than another student to one day be pulled into a doctors office, have it explained that they have this horrible problem, and now get 50% more time on tests than somebody they were already a solid grade point ahead of, a child who statistically we can predict will live their entire lives with higher socioeconomic status and higher quality of life already! Such EQUITY! It's so reflective of the real world too where if you take twice as long to finish work as another employee after being accommodated, your employer will pat you on the back and say "Attaboy!"

https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-...

"To find out why elite colleges love legacies, two business school professors were granted access to 16 years of admissions data at one elite Northeastern college. The upshot: it’s in this school’s clear self-interest to take them. Alumni children who received offers matriculated at much higher rates, giving the school more certainty in their future enrollment numbers. And these loyal families with multi-generational ties to the college were far more likely to donate funds, money that the school needs, in part, to offer scholarships to others."

Colleges want to look good... but no chance in hell they'll give up consistent students of families who donate.

Cost effective? not when it'll cost them millions or billions in kick backs.

Because equity is about keeping people down, not lifting people up.

Based on comments so far, I'm curious what you mean by this. My own take is that you are correct because standardized tests are 'easier to prep for' because, in many ways, they are IQ tests that you can't prep for, or rather that Bang for the Buck of prepping is low. So, poor, smart kids with no prep can take the test hung over and do well, as the author says. Rich folks can get tutors to spend tens or hundreds of hours prepping, and have only a modest impact on their score.

And that makes them perfect for poor kids who don't have much time or money, they can easily get similar levels of test prep as rich kid with little effort. GPA or extracurriculars however, no chance, those are much more dependent on home environment and wealth.

GPA is also much more subject to getting penalized because a teacher straight up hates you for being poor, disabled, male (this one is measurable by having teachers grade tests with different names), ugly, smelly, other thing K-12 teachers tend to dock you for even though on paper they shouldn’t.

Many extracurriculars are also expensive and poor kids don’t get to do a lot of them or excel at them to the same degree.

Extracurriculars I agree with, rich people are more likely to have connections to get the nice internships.

That is just nonsense. Lets say that you have 20 hours to study per year, like a couple of weekends that are calmer etc, you can spend those on SAT and you got basically the full benefits of studying for that test since studying more isn't very beneficial. But 20 hours to study per year wont budge your GPA much at all. Close to every kid can find 20 hours to study per year, I'm pretty sure.

Or do you think that people can either study all the time, or study none of the time, no in-between at all?

Edit:

> it's only theoretical that someone who isn't used to a studying environment can somehow have the foresight to invest their few hours on this particular exam.

Not at all, I never studied for anything in high school and got shit grades. But I spent a weekend to study for a SAT once, got good on that, and got into college that way. This isn't theoretical at all, it happens all the time. It is very different to do something for a very short time, or keeping that up for 4 years straight.

People who study a lot study a lot for the SAT, people who study little study little for the SAT, and in between people do an in between amount of SAT. That somehow seems like a good starting point, which we'll probably be stuck on given evidence will be hard to come by.

FWIW there were kids in my kid's class who had three tutors and studied every day over the summer holiday (the test is right after). They would have stopped if it was so obvious the benefits stop past some level. Just as there will be people who think it's a great idea to put 1000 hours into it, there's going to be people who think they'll just show up on the day and see how it goes.

Edit: seems this wasn't a direct descendent of the the thread I thought it was, about the UK 11+, but the point is the same.

I was one of those kids. I never had a stable home, I have 5 siblings with many parents, I moved between different parents, lived on the floor with mom and siblings at one of her friends homes for a few months etc. But mustering up the energy to put in effort for one test is still possible, doing that for everything, no way.

Kids aren't stupid, they have spent years doing things, reading things, it isn't hard to find out information about college, SAT etc. A bad home doesn't mean you are stupid even though you make it sound like it does.

I also know people who've been in your situation, and that's what I see more often than not.

I can understand if you think that's what the SATs are for though, a kind of lifeline for kids in bad situations. I just have reservations about it actually working enough of the time to not simply be another opportunity hoarding play by wealthier people.

The main effect of removing it is that disenfranchised smart kids don't get into college, replaced by dumb kids with stable homes who spent a ton of time studying yet were too dumb to score well on SAT. Colleges are already full of such kids, and so is the job market, we don't need more of them.

Realistically good test would require that multi-hundred hour build up.

The only exception I can think of are the temporarily poor; e.g. refugees from Southeast Asia or Africa whose families were well to do back home and still have that familial knowledge even if they are currently lacking in money.

All the data shows the exact opposite. Also, it's pretty obvious this is false if you spend 10 seconds thinking about it.

You're forced to give the test yourself. Whereas you can easily hire a tutor to read over and "check" (i.e. rewrite) your school essays/homework.

Rich kids can also easily get internships/research experience while in HS due to family connections.

Grades and extra circular can be gamed as well, but you have to do a lot more planning ahead of time...like you can't just start 6 months before a test date and maybe try again 6 months after that. You have to start form late elementary school and be consistent up until 12th grade.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

The SAT is an IQ test.

When I read what you said and thought the same thing. I then looked up what the author wrote:

Rich kids who “don’t test well.”

He's just saying if you have a kid that doesn't test well (I am one of those) and happen to be wealthy, the rich have options that poor kids don't. He isn't saying rich kids don't tend to test well.

I'm not sure that premise is 100% accurate either. My parents were teachers and we didn't have extravagant lives, but my parents knew the value of an education and forced me to do test prep 6 days a week the summer after my Junior year. I ended up improving my scores and getting into a good state university and subsequently have a good career 25+ years and still going strong.

I think edge case success (students that don't test well) boils down more to parents giving a shit than anything else. It's not easy, that's for sure, even if you are moderately wealthy.

Meanwhile, GPA and extracurriculars are significantly reflections of socialization and parents rather than anyone's inherent or learned abilities.

It's difficult.

My kid recently went through another testing gauntlet, which is the 11+ test. For those who aren't in the Southeast corner of the UK, this is a multiple choice type test that looks a lot like an IQ test in some ways. It's a single sitting and determines whether you are allowed into something called a Grammar School, which is just a selective school, and the test is taken the year the kid turns 11.

So the thing about this test is that nobody will admit to it, but everyone in the middle class will hire tutors to help their kids pass the test. Furthermore, private primary schools will spend a lot of time prepping for this test in the two years before the kids take the test. Plenty of people do both: send their kids to a fee-paying primary school, and pay for tutors.

Guess what, the pass rate for fee-paying (aka independent) schools is way higher than for state schools. It's hard to break down which parents went for state + tutoring, but it's not exactly a stretch to suppose those kids did better than state school kids with no tutoring. Furthermore state schools that do well tend to be in certain wealthy areas.

If you have a look at one of these tests, it's pretty clear you benefit from practicing. Like just about any test, if you've done it before you are at an advantage, the more the better.

I don't see how this isn't gaming the test. The idea with a test is to uncover which kids will get the most out of the selective school, but how is that going to work when a select few are prepped for the test?

Now just for the record I did the SAT back when I was a kid. It's pretty much the same as the 11+, for a slightly older age group. Again, it doesn't make any sense to say it's hard to game. People are gaming it as we speak.

I think what might actually be hard to game is teacher recommendations. After all these people have been with the kid for a long time and know what they can do. They also tend to be distanced enough that they don't have to say good things about every kid.

Give ten kids from the same class a self study online course and give another ten a private tutor, and they won't see the same score distribution. Where's the signal there?

SAT results don't have a line item that notes the amount of wealth or privilege that went into preparing.

> Immigrant families eligible for reduced price lunch are able to scrounge up the money for these tests.

Some families can't. Other families aren't aware, or aren't interested. But we judge the kids in the family for that.

That said... I don't know how the _new_ system will work at fighting that privilege -- there are still lots of ways for it to disguise itself. But we have to at least acknowledge the issues with the SAT.

But, to me at least, this goes beyond privilege. This is about diversity of skills and diversity of learner profiles and moving away from linear quantification of potential.

The effects of studying "for the test" as you put have been measured, improved test taking skills tends to be worth ~30 points which is not that significant. This matches my anecdotal experience and that of people I know who run SAT prep courses.

It's far more effective to actually teach students the material, either by teaching them new concepts or by firming up their understanding to ones they've already been exposed to. Particularly in Math, many students in high school have shaky understandings of fractions or algebra. Firming up these foundations can often lead to >100 point increase (given sufficient lead time). Those foundations are something the test is actually looking for since numeracy and strong algebra skills are a strong predictor of success in Calculus.

It's true that tutoring grants unfair advantages but this is going to be true in any system that uses skills as part of a selection criteria.

You're right that 30 points isn't that much if you're thinking about the whole distribution, but I guarantee it can be significant around the selection threshold. That threshold might be implicit or explicit, but it's there, and if it's enough to nudge applicants past it, it's significant.

As long as we have "prestige" universities there's going to be some form of skills testing, and no one has ever designed an un-gameable test that can be administered nationally. The question we have to ask ourselves then is how we can reduce game-ability and I doubt we can make improvements that are more than incremental.

I see this often but I suspect that it is lumping "Took a prep class for 1 hour on a Saturday" and "Spent 6 hours a week for 52 weeks with a tutor" in the same category.

Any tutor who only gets a 30 point increase won't be seeing much business among the folks I know.

However, I do agree with you that firming up skills is a remarkably quick way to get a significant boost. Being able to add 2 + 2 and come up with 4, repeatedly and accurately is often a big deal on these tests even with a calculator.

That's probably not true. Studies show limited benefit from test prep--most of that comes just from familiarizing yourself with the exam format. Moreover, private tutoring is a couple of thousand dollars one time, not tens of thousands of dollars a year like it's portrayed. Indeed, it's a way for the kids of parents who can scrape together $1,500 for one summer to compete with the kids of parents who can pay $30,000 a year for private school.

> Some families can't.

My uncle tutors math in a subsidized apartment complex and the local families manage to pay. You're talking about a very small percentage of the population where the kids would be qualified for college, but can't afford any form of test prep. It's very weird for that tiny slice of the population to carry so much weight in this debate.

> Other families aren't aware, or aren't interested.

Sounds like the solution to that is to raise awareness?

I'm in favor of using tests like that SAT as cheaper diagnostic tests, to help with student placements and accommodations, not for admissions. It's too bad this is being lost with the removal of the testing requirements, but I guess it doesn't matter much as the tests were never used this way in the first place, despite providing this information. https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ACT%20Paper%20... (note that I don't agree with the conclusions of this paper, merely the identified diagnostic criteria)

> This is about diversity of skills and diversity of learner profiles

I might believe that if I didn't believe that the diversity would mostly be token, with the majority of students in selective schools fitting a handful of templates.

As a result that practice has been reversed and teachers now use the result from the standardised test again when making their recommendation.

How can you compare recommendations from different teachers? The whole point of the SAT is that it is a single number: you can compare SAT results from different schools and see which children are better at taking the test.

> If you have a look at one of these tests, it's pretty clear you benefit from practicing. Like just about any test, if you've done it before you are at an advantage, the more the better.

Yes, but you can't get from 500 to 1500 by practicing. You can probably get from 1450 to 1500, but that's just a few practice sessions to learn what the questions look like, how to fill in the answer sheet, how to tackle the most common ones.

When I was 11, I had a teacher lean over during class and tell me how much she didn't like me, that I was the laziest student she had ever had, and that she couldn't wait until the end of the year because she wouldn't have to see me any more. To be fair: I wasn't a horrible student, was usually quiet without many friends, and just wasn't at the point to handle 2-3 hours of homework, probably due to undiagnosed issues.

I learned that teachers don't always have your best interests at heart, and I couldn't trust any of them much. I couldn't imagine the stress of trying to impress teachers to the point of getting recommendations, and I can't imagine she'd have given me one and I probably would have been scared to ask the others after that. On the other hand, it also became quite clear that you could game the system a little if you got the teachers to like you.

Just because they don't have to say good things about every kid doesn't mean that all of them will say things that give a fair assessment, though a lot would try a little more than this woman did.

On the other hand, it taught me early how life actually works.

So then I ended up where we have this one time test, which stresses the hell out of everyone. Luckily he did well on it, school decisions came out last week and he got what he wanted.

I'm not actually sure which is better, part of why I thought maybe teacher recommendations would have been better was that my kid would undoubtedly get recommended if that were the system, he just happens to have that thing that teachers recognise. But even so he could have had a bad day and not made it in the system we actually live in.

Private schools don't give as much 11+ help as you would think - if a child passes the 11+, the private lose all the potential senior school fees.

Tutoring for the exam definitely helps, but it's mostly exam technique and practise on those types of logical reasoning questions. They can't do the questions for you.

The variation is enormous though. My kid's school is boasting about 95% of their kids passing the test. I know they've been prepping the test because well, that's what the kid has been doing for past couple of years.

> if a child passes the 11+, the private lose all the potential senior school fees.

It's true that some schools try to discourage the kids from taking it for that reason, but of course that's only true if there's a senior school section.

At least with tests you could release previous tests and then possibly some groups could release free instructions on key points or tactics.

Recommendation letters aren't worth a lot. Most kids who have a shot at getting into a top-ranked school surely have some teachers they got along with. But then there's the luck of the draw whether said teacher will also put in an effort beyond a pro-forma recommendation.

Teacher recommendations are incredibly easy to game. I asked my teachers for recommendations and, to help jog their memory and for their convenience, provided them a sample letter of recommendation that I wrote. They could sign and send that one, use the content as a reminder to write their own, or start from scratch.

I don’t think teacher recommendations are great. Presumably parents who currently pay for test prep will instead throw money at getting good teacher recommendations through the right schools, teaching good manners, etc. If I look at my mother and her sister, one went to the grammar school and the other didn’t because they had gotten a new headmistress who didn’t really know the students. The grammar school stopped being selective after a few years anyway (did I mention that grammar schools have been a hot topic for a long time…) and I think the teachers struggled with the change. Perhaps another difference is that grammar schools are often single-sex which I think has a bunch of benefits and drawbacks.

> Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack. All this talk about equity is the most convenient and cost-effective way to eliminate the one barrier that most vexes rich parents.

It's also a good way to sneak in affirmative action (racial discrimination really) in places where voters and taxpayers repeatedly said no, like in the UC system, since it removes an objective measure and leaves more "holistic" criterions an admission committee can use to accept or deny (without giving out any explanation) a candidate. [0]

[0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian-...

And what are the real goals of these institutions? The whole approach of having artificially limited education where people are sifted into higher and lower status classes based upon judgements made when they're teenagers is premised on elitism, not equity. That's the purpose of these institutions - not to education as many people as possible, but to restrict education to a privileged few in order to increase their own worth. Saying they're concerned about equity is like the casinos that put up signs saying they're concerned about gambling addiction.

There's a reason why Harvard is happy to take people's money and give them an education in the Harvard Extension School, but why they firmly tell those people they can't call themselves Harvard graduates. Contrast this with OMSCS, where they firmly say an in-person degree and an online degree will be the same thing.

Some of the public funds come by way of Pell Grants. What's so terrible about poor kids getting a top-tier education?

Other mechanisms are research grants. You don't think it's in the public's interest to incentivize graduate students at top institutions to do socially beneficial research?

Help me understand what your objection is to federal policy, and what you wish federal policy were instead.

You indicated a problem with the way federal funds are spent. What section of what federal statute should be changed? In what way should it be changed?

I spelled out pretty clearly why somebody might have issues with taxpayers subsidizing the tuition of a Harvard graduate.

You expressed disapproval of the fact "[t]hat public funds can go to private schools like Harvard."

I tried to guess what you might mean, but it appears you've found those guesses insulting. So why don't you just clear it up so we aren't left guessing? What are the specific changes to federal law you propose as an alternative?

In this case though, Harvard doesn't need it, and there are definitely enough Harvard graduates in the upper echelons of both the public servant and elected politician career paths of the federal government apparatus for no harm to ever happen to Harvard. But it's still an important point to keep in mind I think.

Its kind of like when Nokia used to sell the mobile phones with gold plating and the only way to get one was via an invite from an influencer. Basically creating the perception of value via false scarcity.

The first elite university school system that can physically expand to multiple campuses to accommodate new in person students and provide them with the exact same quality education and opportunities to network with legacy students will become Apple of collegiate education.

IMHO, the UC school system gets probably closest to this ideal.

And lots of colleges are known for their teachers. You can't always just hire another identical teacher: good ones are rare. At elite schools, they are often even famous and individually important in their field. You cannot scale that.

The way our societies & industries still function, too many highly educated people is not the end goal. There's still a long road to grow the percentage of "information workers", especially roles needing higher education, and frankly all that seems to mean is that you outsource all manufacturing to other countries -- I think we've seen lately that wasn't the greatest idea.

Just wanted to add since I've looked into Harvard Extension School (HES): a HES graduate from a degree program is enrolled in the Harvard Alumni Association and does get to refer to themselves as a "Harvard graduate".

The degree is from the HES with a degree in "Extension Studies", which is the big distinction versus "real" Harvard, but I also suspect that beyond you first or second job, that becomes about as meaningful as your GPA.

Also importantly, that difference has come up in the last few years, to the point where the Harvard College Undergraduate Council and the Harvard Graduate Council both voted last year in favour to remove that differentiation from HES degrees[1]. It is however, Harvard University that has to decide, although it's quite interesting that the students - who are generally considered to be the ones who make the biggest fuss about "real" Harvard - are the ones in support of the move.

It's also worth noting that the child of a HES graduate is still considered a legacy, so that benefit is also conferred on their family.

---

[1] https://blogs.harvard.edu/lamont/2022/03/28/harvard-college-...

It amazes me how corrupt higher education is now. It is AMAZINGLY corrupt.

There is this thing with getting old (I'm in late 40s now) where you think the world is going to hell, but really what is happening is that you are figuring out EXACTLY how fucked up everything is.

However, sometimes things really are going to hell (increasing rich/poor divide, environment/global warming, vast increase in higher ed/healthcare/housing relative to inflation).

Anyway, in this case, I still am trying to gauge if my fondness for the general institution of higher education circa late 1990s was actually still somewhat deserved at the time and it has _truly_ fallen apart in the next 25-30 years, or if it was this bad for the last 40-50 (I can argue there's a good chance it was a great institution in the 1960s fresh after post-WWII investment in higher ed by the gubberment).

Anyone have thoughts? I personally think it is ACTUALLY worse, that the rise of the huge administrator/MBAs in higher ed has led to do-anything-for-a-buck, and it REALLY is this bad.

Signs that it actually is bad:

- the stupendous rise in cost / that little student loan crisis we have

- the stupendous rise in Div I coaching salaries and facilities

- the amount of frivolous facilities built

- the rise of the minimum wage adjunct professor

- the decline of import of tenure (revenue/publishing/research is now everything)

- the decline of humanities. I still as a science guy look down at them, but they are historically important (as in over 1000s of years) to educational institutions.

- grade inflation, it is pay for degree even in some Ivies it appears now

This is so true. When I was younger I thought "oh what a cynical thought, I should cheer up and be less gloomy". Now I realize I was right. The sheer amount of waste arising from badly managed orgs with wrong incentives is just enormous. This is why we don't have flying cars and teleporters.

If you consider that universities these days let in a lot more people, it's inevitable that the academic level is lower. Back in the day someone doing a phd had a reasonable chance of becoming a professor. Now there's so many people the university is not really for producing knowledge, that's just a side business to giving a stamp of approval to your average middle class kid who is not gonna be doing research.

Asians mostly come from poor families compared to west. Here is distribution of test scores and Asians have top scores.

https://twitter.com/monitoringbias/status/163214392094241587...

The school I was attending decided in my last year that it was no longer doing "need-blind" admissions. There was a minor uproar, but of course it went through.

So... you're saying the school will preferentially let in richer students to the organization if they can? You know, two applications being allegedly equal?

I leave it as an exercise to the reader how much objectivity on "equal applications" when one of the students basically is 10x richer (and parents that might donate), when you have to see how well affirmative action with "equal applications" has worked to get minorities into white collar jobs.

Of course what the college was doing was probably formalizing what it was doing anyway. Why would it do that?

Ohhhh,,, right, lets do way more egregious pay-for-admission that "pick the richer between equals". Right.

Then a decade later, I noticed all these chinese nationals on universitites, and the students said they were a bit of a headache because they were so obnoxiously rich.

Oh! The colleges figured out how to kill two birds with one stone: a rich foreigner is a minority AND rich! So they would coddle these scions as much as possible.

The kids with sufficiently "decent" parents get handled with kid gloves and rule adherence, everyone else gets punched down and half-assery even when if they're experiencing injustice and unfairness.

Have known so many bright kids who get nowhere because of schools.

That if one kid is poor or minority or unstable background, etc., and a bit of a loose cannon, they'll get graded lower for the same answers, punished or dismissed if they question anything, not going to be able or willing to check in before school or after class for more help, etc., meanwhile goody two shoes daughter of the town dentists will give the same answers, socialize better with the teacher, who knows the parent's status, and likes the kid, give her points back, and by the end of the semester they'll both be just as smart, but one will have an A- and the other a C+.

Basically kids having the "right" kind of parents and community connections and behavioral signifiers is at least ~1 letter grade overall regardless of students and ability.

The only way to game that metric would be for the wealthy to send their kids to schools that perform worse, which would wind up driving more resources to those schools.

Semi-related anecdote: my alma mater (Swarthmore) got huge pushback from donors when it tried to eliminate its football team, which was legendarily bad and created a huge, costly title IX imbalance (apparently football rosters can be 100+). So there was about as clear a case for elimination as you could hope for, and still it was a big controversy that hurt the school where administrators tend to notice — its endowment.

So when we talk about eliminating legacy admissions, I picture that, but just a thousand times worse.

If you're concerned about the wellbeing of black people, and you justify your concern with statistics pointing out that they're disproportionately poor, why not, instead of instituting preferential treatment for black people (which, btw, is racist), you support preferential treatment for poor people instead? That way, you are more efficient (e.g. your resources aren't wasted on Obama's daughters, who are certainly sufficiently privileged already), while also helping people who weren't captured by your superficial assessment ("black <==> poor").

1) Black people are not actually less “good at stuff”, we just have a habit of defining “stuff” in a way that excludes the things that black people are more likely to excel at.

And, 2) Where black people do statistically worse, it’s not due to any innate difference, it’s because socially accepted “normal” support systems are more useful for people with challenges more common in white populations than challenges common in black populations.

So the idea is, if you change the support systems and measures of success to be more universal, the differences will go away.

And then the metric for whether administrative bodies have succeeded in this is “equal outcomes”. What you call “racism”.

But the inferences on which this affirmative action position are based make rational sense. There’s no logical flaw. There’s no conclusive evidence for these hypothesis either, but they are logically plausible.

The opposite perspective is the same: rational, yet lacking any basis in evidence. That is the perspective that black people, through biology, socialization, and/or culture, are actually “worse at stuff”. And the support systems and performance metrics are fair.

There’s no way to prove something is “fair” or “not fair” in the face of “unequal outcomes”. It just comes down to what you want to believe. There’s no rational basis to come to one conclusion or the other.

I choose to believe that all of the big categories of people are pretty similarly “good at things” but I can acknowledge that belief is a leap of faith. The truth is unknowable.

1) It is trivially true that if you define your measure right, you can make anyone succeed. For example black people are better at looking like black people. But we try to define "stuff" in a way that correlates with ability to do economically useful tasks. There are excellent reasons to do so.

2) You are ignoring the obvious fact that blacks do NOT get anything like equal treatment. They start with terrible schools, in neighborhoods that are aggressively targeted by police, and grow up with realistic expectations of going to jail that are amply born out by lived experiences. It takes willful blindness and stupidity to ignore that there are excellent reasons why we should expect poor black performance.

Given that the inferences on which this affirmative action position are based require willful blindness and stupidity to believe, there really is a giant logical flaw. It is most emphatically NOT plausible to say that we should expect equal performance from children whose fathers are in jail, whose schools are atrocious, whose neighborhood is dangerous, and who rightly believe that they are being unfairly targeted by police. Both how common these factors are and how important they are to actual outcomes is borne out by extensive research.

The scientific truth is that we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other. The reason being that we have no way to separate out the impact of racism and history from innate ability. Read https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th... if you want a more complete accounting of that fact.

But you do not need to have an opinion on that question to identify many factors that are helping ensure that black kids don't get a fair shake at life. And it is obvious that affirmative action can be at best too little, too late, compared to the things most urgently in need of fixing.

I agree with you that it’s not fair, I’m just acknowledging that the adjudication of fairness happens outside the reach of science. It’s a matter of values not evidence.

But the others contradict most of what you said. The pro-affirmative action position that you outlined requires willful blindness and stupidity to accept. It is very emphatically not equally valid to the alternatives.

There may be better arguments for accepting affirmative action as valid. But that one is terrible.

I'm sorry but this is blatantly false. "Innately better" is a vague and inflammatory term, but if you define the measure, we can use straightforward statistical techniques to find correlations.

Simple example: East Africans outperform others in long-distance running. In sprinting, west Africans outperform.

We can separate confounders out because we have large data sets. You don't have to just try to compare populations as a mass. We can, for example, look at performance only of black people raised in white families. Or rich black people. Or white people raised in black families. Etc.

Taking the example of IQ, which is the most important statistical measure in these discussions, we can also look at poor populations with high IQ, like Jews (at certain historical times) or various groups of people from East Asia. Vietnamese boat people are a great comparison. It has to be explained how they were so successful despite facing the very similar or arguably worse challenges (e.g. holocaust) as other population groups.

Or look at subgroups of black people, like Nigerian immigrants to America, who have generally better social outcomes than average whites.

All this has been studied to death for decades and many conclusions are well-supported by statistics (at least as well-supported as lots of noncontroversial findings).

It is, to put it mildly, not at all well established how SES and assessed intelligence interact.

Likewise while you can look at historical Jews as a poor population with high IQ, you have the confounder that even then Jews placed a strong cultural value on education and intelligence. And therefore, even while they were poor, Jews were likely to work to improve themselves on both. Therefore this leaves open the question of how much of the difference is due to this cultural factor versus innate genetics.

In the case of Vietnamese boat people, we have families that literally risked their lives for a chance at a better future. This attitude taken to a new country suggests that we should expect them to make the most of any opportunity that they can find. How much of their subsequent success is due to this attitude?

On Nigerian immigrants, I'd need to see a source to believe your "generally better social outcomes" comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans puts the 2018 median household income for members of the Nigerian diaspora into the USA at $68,658. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26... the median household income for white non-Hispanic households at $70,642. At least on the easiest to check social outcome, whites are still doing better.

That said, Nigerians who arrive here tend to be motivated and well-educated. I'm not sure how you can distinguish that from genetics. Doubly so since the poster child for racist claims about IQ is the poor performance of US blacks. Blacks whose African ancestry includes a significant share of Nigerian.

So yes, we can cite volumes of statistics. And it is easy for find lots of books like The Bell Curve that actually do. But when you dig in you won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to genetics rather than some cultural factor.

I think it is more likely that culture drives genetics. If you have a group whose culture favors intermarriage, where marriage is encouraged and even arranged between families with intellectual success, and which enables the resulting couples to have many children, that would tend to drive the genetics of the group.

Sexual selection is tied to culture.

For example from the middle ages to the present, individual self-control greatly increased and this caused homicide rates to drop by a factor of 10. See https://www.vrc.crim.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/manuel... for verification.

Elizabethan England was incredibly bawdy by all accounts. And yet the same country a few centuries later was Victorian England, one of the most sexually uptight societies on record. Genetics didn't change that much, how did that happen?

Germany from the mid-1800s through WW 2 was one of the most warlike societies imaginable. Germany since has turned into a country of peaceniks with no interest in invading anyone, and who are unable to even cough up what they promised for self-defense. How did that happen?

The truth is that while factors from genetics to parasites like toxoplasma can impact culture, culture changes far too rapidly to be dismissed as simply an outcome of genetics.

This is an isolated demand for proof. At the level of proof you're demanding, basically nothing can be said about anything in terms of social science one way or the other. There are basically never 'single statistics' that are isolated from all alternative explanation.

Instead, one should apply the same standards and skepticism to all hypotheses. In this case, both for and against genetic/cultural explanations.

(Even so, "you won't find a single statistic whose difference can be clearly attributed to genetics rather than some cultural factor" is untrue; differences in athletic performance satisfy this demand.)

Does all of world history count as data? What should we go by? Propose a test.

It is true that all of world history is data, but it is not necessarily data that can answer any particular question. The problem is the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Both genetics and environment are important to IQ. Both generally affect IQ through long, convoluted, and poorly understood reasons of cause and effect. Therefore we can establish evidence of differences, but can't necessarily distinguish between theories about the causes of those differences.

What would make a difference is a theory of mechanism. For example it is uncontroversial that people with ancestry from Nigeria are better at sprinting, and people with ancestry from Kenya are better at long distance running. For this we can identify specific facts about body type that help with sprinting versus long distance running, and we can identify strong evidence that these body type differences are due to genetics.

But we have no such theory of mechanism that can be applied to IQ. And therefore the mass of data we have about the existence of differences does not distinguish between potential causes of said differences.

We can also verify that differences in thinking speed between individuals has a large component due to genetics, and also another large component due to environment. Everything from diet to the quality of parental interactions in early childhood.

What we can't determine is to whether genetics contributes to the differences in thinking speed between groups of people. We can identify important environmental factors like culture and racism. We can show that environmental facts matter. For example children of mixed race couples have a higher average IQ if they have white mothers. But nobody has found a way to measure what difference genetics might or might not make.

World class sprinters have an over-representation of individuals descended from a specific region of Nigeria - you can't generalize that to "Nigerians sprint faster than Europeans",or "Black people sprint faster than white people" the way people do with IQ. It is also prudent to note that Kenya has a whole ecosystem nurturing long distance runners; with a wealth of academies, trainers available to the young who show some talent, so ascribing Kenyan's prowess to nature alone is incorrect.

Nutrition and IQ are correlated independent of race; especially early-childhood nutrition. Standardized testing is further compounded by test prep and tutors (proxy for wealth). Wealth in a family correlates to parents' education level. The lack of education in older African Americans has an obvious historical explanation. Most black Americans are descended from slaves from West Africa, but don't do as well as recent West African immigrants - 29% of Nigerian-Americans have advanced degrees; more than any other immigrant group. "Nature" doesn't explain the stark disparity of academic outcomes between two groups that are both of west African descent.

That said, there are a lot of ways to throw money at a problem and produce very little in the way of results. The education establishment is very, very good at it.(That would be a rant for another day - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a flavor.)

And about crime, the issue of targeting by police is not necessarily the neighborhood, but the person. When police see someone "who doesn't look like they belong", that person gets targeted. As a result black people in affluent neighborhoods get stopped a lot more than white people in the same neighborhoods. So even if black and white kids are doing bad things in similar amounts, the blacks are going to get arrested for it at a far higher rate.

This is not just a random conspiracy theory. See https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/study-ra... for an example of research on racial disparities of how policing is done in Los Angeles. Many other cities have similar problems.

That the problem is not just limited to one bad police department is shown by a simple statistics. In surveys, blacks and whites do illegal drugs at similar rates. But blacks are arrested and charged for that at several times the rate that whites are. And so the arrest and jail statistics make it look like blacks are doing far more drugs than whites. But our best evidence is arrest records are a very severely racially biased sample of what is actually happening.

That said, I'm mostly in agreement with you on affirmative action. But there is one data point that shows a flaw in your argument. It is easy to argue that policies that helped a half-Kenyan kid get into Columbia for undergraduate and Harvard for law school won't help American blacks very much. But Barack Obama went on to become the first black US President. And the symbolism of that seems to be very important for inspiring US blacks in general. So even though it doesn't seem to me like it should matter, in practice it seems to have.

I am not going to pretend to know the details of California school funding. But broadly speaking schools which get less local funding usually get more funding from state and federal sources. And the national average per pupil differences between the poorest and richest school districts are really not that large, but these numbers are very tricky (much more spent in nyc than idaho, etc.). Some anecdotes: recently there was a viral video of a school in Indiana, I think Carmel. Everyone was very impressed by the school facilities and it seemed to confirm the prior that rich kids get more funds. But then it turned out the average spending per pupil at that school is less than half the per pupil spending of DC public schools. Now there may be good reasons DC would spend more (COL etc.), but even adjusting for that the spending wouldn't be that different. Carmel just spends the money better. Anecdote 2: I have taught school in rural areas at schools which are absolutely poor in terms of facilities and everything else. I don't think tripling the spending per student would have done anything at all to change outcomes there...the students could usually not make it through a 40 min lesson without attacking each other or totally disrupting things. No reasonable amount of money would have changed this. It is not that expensive to educate a kid, you just need to feed them and teach them things that have been known for hundreds or thousands of years from old books. What is going wrong, I think, does not have to do with differences in school funding.

I think Obama's legacy is yet to be understood. Something like "the inspirational power of the symbol of a black president" is difficult to measure. The worsening race relations and their societal impacts (and their causes) since he took office is also hard to measure. Im curious what your evidence is to say "it seems very important for inspiring US blacks in general". Inspiring them to do what? And how is this quantified? (I guess by asking people "who is your hero" or something).

Sitting at my son's IEP meetings with a roomful of expensive professionals who documented all of the ineffective things that they were doing was eye-opening. I pulled him from public school and put him in a private school that specialized in children with lack of executive function (primarily ADHD and autistic). For a cost of about half the per student average in the school he was in (where he had cost far more than average) he got real help. He went from there to a college prep school that is far more academically rigorous than public schools, at similar per capita cost.

He is doing far better than public schools could have done, in a much more cost effective way.

On minority schools, a big part of the problem isn't funding. For many good reasons, schools in bad districts see very high turnover. As a result their teachers tend to be inexperienced. Plus there is the whole disrupted classroom issue, which is much worse in a tough neighborhood.

And about Obama, statistics do not support his having made lives better for blacks in general. But he's still cited as an inspiration a whole lot. And his success seems to have inspired other blacks to try to perform at the top level. Including our current vice president. So he seems to have become a useful symbol.

This argument is at least 40 years old and twice as tired. Richard Rodriguez was plying this in the late 80s, and the anti-affirmative action squad in Cali in the 90s.

It is not "too little too late", it is "better late than never". The disadvantages of background usually crop up as crippling impostor syndrome, which can be helped with the right reinforcement, but the idea that "fathers in jail" or "police brutality" in somebody's background invalidates their access to a higher education is a cop out at best.

The main thing this apologism hides is the inescapable fact that mediocrity + centrality wins every time. Look at any school and you will see the folks with "the right background" making it through. Meanwhile, you will also see those from the challenged backgrounds you describe often dropping out and _not_ because of grades but because the whole environment screams "you don't belong here".

I'm pretty sure there needs to be a 3) blacks are poorer as well.

They're poor now because they were prevented from gaining wealth then, and wealth grows geometrically

It requires acknowledgement of an injustice, and a requirement that the perpetrator has to make good on it. In the case of blacks we have forcible capture, slavery, a variety of discriminatory laws and policies, lynchings, and so on. There is no shortage of historical wrongs done to blacks that were never meaningfully made up for.

So far, so good. However the logic runs into some major problems. First of all, what are the rights of current blacks to reparations due to the wrongs done to their ancestors? Second, how do we identify the perpetrators who need to owe repayment? Third, is it fair to punish those descendants now for the actions of ancestors that they do not know? And fourth, what reparation would be sufficient?

My personal position is as follows.

First, if we extend to one group reparations for wrong past, we have to extend this to all groups. That way lays insanity. I'm half Irish. My ancestors were targeted by the KKK for being Catholic, targeted by the English over centuries for being Irish, and escaped to the USA from an entirely preventable famine. Every ethnic group can rehearse its own story of victimhood, and the act of doing so primarily harms those groups again.

Second, identifying perpetrators is hard. For example American blacks are more likely to be descended from slaveholders than the average white American. I grew up in poverty and there were no slaveholders in my ancestors for at least the last 200 years. I don't think it is fair to ask me to pay for the crimes of other people's ancestors.

Third, holding people accountable for the actions of their ancestors crosses the line into collective punishment. Collective punishments of all kinds are considered human rights violations, no matter how strong the rationale. See https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v2/rule103 for a list.

Fourth, no one-time cash reparation can make up for the ongoing problems that we continue to inflict on black communities. Therefore rather than focusing on the justices or injustices of such reparations we should focus on fixing what we continue to do wrong in the present. Of which, unfortunately, there is no shortage.

Slavery was that long ago.

White's were sold as slaves in North Africa before black slaves where brought to America. Even white women were sold as sex slaves and they used to call them "White Gold". ( You can search for term "White Gold Slavery")

Do whites also get reparations?

Additionally nobody talks about modern day slavery, which are sex slaves. There are millions of women stuck in that trade who were forced in to it against their will and they cannot leave.

And even if you don't know what the connection is, that doesn't mean that there isn't one. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6127768/ and https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenet... are examples explaining some of the research on how epigenetics can pass trauma down the generations. We don't know how far it can transmit.

However, regardless of whether there is an impact, EVERY ethnic group has severe trauma in its past. And you generally don't have to go back more than a century or two to find it. The best thing to do is fix our present, and try to create a better future. Which, globally, we've generally been doing at a breathtaking pace.

Albeit with important exceptions. Such as problems that teenage girls began having with mental health starting about 10 years ago. Which may be tied to social media applications.

It's starting to get some traction with regulators as well: https://www.progresstogether.co.uk/

Basically whatever metric you choose will leave gaps. And if you try to universally implement a system you get other negative effects (from cost, to information overwhelm, to non-adaptability).

Because the equity that the school cares about above all else is its endowment, and rich family legacies give more than anyone else by far.

Why does this even exist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

College education has always been sold as a way to keep your children elite, and to the less well-to-do, as a golden ticket to being elite. The issue with education is that it has been marketed as the ultimate wealth signal: "My daughter is attending ______." (too bad for your daughter who is at ______ State)

> Standardized test scores are the hardest metric to game, and hence, are most under attack.

While this is true, standardized tests tend to favor children from more stable family situations and higher levels of wealth. The attack on the SAT is usually from the side favoring evening the odds for less financially advantaged groups.

> Elite colleges are eliminating standardized tests before they eliminate legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know.

It's the same stupidity that leads well-thinking liberals to bring their kids to drag strip shows because in their little mind "trans = gogo dancers in gay clubs".

It's much easier to believe that this is being driven by college administrators who know that the way to advance their careers in the current climate is by passing radical social justice changes, and this particular idea is simply an organically popular fad among social justice influencers so it's the one they've latched onto.

Very rough example but the idea is this. Philosophically/ethically, it seems better. But practically as well: you want to admit the students most likely to excel if given the high quality resources at your university. Among a kid with all the comforts and private tutoring and all that, and a kid who rose way above his shitty lot in life, wouldn't the latter fit that description better?

Or they just completely fake it, like a few cases that were discovered a few years ago. [1]

Let's be honest though. Those with less "polish" that would be admitted on purely objective/anonymous merir might even excel academically at the university, but they would be excluded by the very same social games being played here.

Sometimes they might even be told that explicitly but usually an excuse will be concocted.

The real question should be:

> What is more cruel, excluding them early on or allowing them to "win" but then ignore them completely when the benefits of that are to be distributed?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal

It should satisfy people who want elite universities to be places to rub shoulders with other elites. My hope is that such a policy would reduce the incentive to game the ordinary system by throwing money at it.

But I guess the whole thing feels terribly unegalitarian and so couldn’t happen.

Perhaps an easier improvement would be if enrolment could be massively (say >2x) increased at elite schools.

The SAT has flaws, like AIs trained on criminal records has flaws.

Getting rid of a flawed test won't suddenly make rich privilege suddenly increase

Zoe Bee did a good video on grades... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew

My next statement will be controversial, and is largely anecdotal, but there is very little to no research that contradicts my opinion, so I'm going to say it anyway. Smart, capable people who simply "don't test well" are almost non-existent. Even if they did, you can't accurately identify who doesn't test well except by giving them a job and letting them prove they were capable when they aren't under testing pressure. I have met hundreds of people who claimed they simply didn't test well, and only one of them later proved it by being genuinely capable and competent.

The thing that pisses me off the most about this whole debate, is that it only really matters if you think it matters whether you went to one of the top 10 universities available to you. Frankly, most employers will throw out your application if it says Harvard School of Business. The number of management jobs that want Harvard graduates is less than half the graduating class, and Business majors have it easier than most of the engineering degrees in that respect. If you're an electrical engineer, there are fewer than 100 jobs Nation wide, and they are already occupied. If you want to be a civil engineer, straight up forget about it. The medical and legal schools are the only exception, and those are graduate schools only.

There is far too much focus on whether the top 10 university admissions are fair and equitable, and far too little focus on whether we have affordable universities that meet decent educational standards for everyone who could reasonably earn a useful degree.

We definitely shouldn't be trying to get rid of standardized tests. There are arguments that can be made about their content, especially historically, but they have merit in showing whether a student is ready for certain classes. At a normal university, they use SAT and ACT scores to decide if you can skip algebra and go straight to calculus, or if you need to take even more basic classes before algebra, and they do this for science and English courses as well. Having such a laser focus on how the top 10 or top 50 schools that actually turn away applicants because they're at capacity is a massive failure to see the actual big picture when it comes to education.