4 ms·

Education is a zero sum game for the applicants. But it's not a zero sum game in total. The university and society as a whole gain a greater benefit from the st

by slivym 8y ago

Education is a zero sum game for the applicants. But it's not a zero sum game in total. The university and society as a whole gain a greater benefit from the student with the higher potential getting the place. All other things being equal the candidate who is smartest when they apply will maximize the resultant graduate. You could formalize it as y=mx+c where C is the candidates current education level, m is the candidate's innate ability to learn and x is the quality of the course, and y is the final quality of the candidate after getting the degree. All other things are not equal though, and making a judgement only about the C of each candidate does not maximize y. SATs measure C, affirmative action does a really crappy job of trying to estimate m.

cgiles 8y ago
I like this way of framing it, although I find it questionable whether SATs, grades, etc measure C exclusively. Because almost all candidates are the same age when applying, C also carries information about m, in the sense that the same equation applies to their time in K-12, so candidates with a high C did so either because they had a high learning rate (m) or went to a high-quality high school or had a high-quality environment (x), or some combination. Thus I would say that SAT score measures mx. C at time t = mx + C at t - 1, or dC/dt = mx. Schools are interested in m, which is not easily measurable directly. Affirmative action is a very crude way to look for candidates that have a high m, low x, and moderate to high C at application time. My conclusion is that if it were possible, colleges would ideally look for candidates that performed substantially better on SATs etc than their peers at each high school, as that would control for x and allow you to estimate m. Affirmative action, on the other hand, is a cruder but partially functional way to do this, as it uses race as a bad proxy for x.

by slivym 8y ago

cgiles 8y ago

I like this way of framing it, although I find it questionable whether SATs, grades, etc measure C exclusively. Because almost all candidates are the same age when applying, C also carries information about m, in the sense that the same equation applies to their time in K-12, so candidates with a high C did so either because they had a high learning rate (m) or went to a high-quality high school or had a high-quality environment (x), or some combination. Thus I would say that SAT score measures mx. C at time t = mx + C at t - 1, or dC/dt = mx. Schools are interested in m, which is not easily measurable directly. Affirmative action is a very crude way to look for candidates that have a high m, low x, and moderate to high C at application time. My conclusion is that if it were possible, colleges would ideally look for candidates that performed substantially better on SATs etc than their peers at each high school, as that would control for x and allow you to estimate m. Affirmative action, on the other hand, is a cruder but partially functional way to do this, as it uses race as a bad proxy for x.