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The problem with elite colleges like Harvard, has nothing to do with meritocracy. In fact, it's the opposite. They use opaque and subjective criteria in their a

by noego 7y ago

The problem with elite colleges like Harvard, has nothing to do with meritocracy. In fact, it's the opposite. They use opaque and subjective criteria in their admissions process, in order to favor those born into privilege. For a better example of a meritocracy, take a look at New York's elite magnet schools like Stuyvesant. Their admissions process is a pure meritocracy - based entirely on a standardized exam that is taken by all applicants. The end result - Stuyvesant has far more economic diversity than any elite university. Almost half the students come from families poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches. Harvard would do the nation a tremendous service if it became more meritocratic, not less https://outlookzen.com/2017/03/24/481/ https://outlookzen.com/2017/03/24/481/

shaklee3 7y ago
Economic diversity, yes. But Stuyvesant is 92% white and Asian, which is not racially diverse.
- p1esk 7y ago
  Are you suggesting they let in people who failed the standardized exam just to improve racial diversity?
  - killjoywashere 7y ago
    Perhaps you're not from the US? There is a strong current of sentiment in some quarters of the US that this is exactly what should happen if society's playing field is every going to be leveled.
    - achillesheels 7y ago
      And that’s how bridges collapse.
    - p1esk 7y ago
      I care more about what people on this forum think.
    - kortilla 7y ago
      How does letting in stupid people level the playing field? I want a doctor who is qualified to be a doctor, not someone who got by because they checked a diversity box. The reason graduating from a prestigious school is valuable is because the graduates have some expected level of quality. Letting in stupid people doesn’t do the stupid people much good, and it certainly harms the prestige of an institution that was supposed to be focused on academics. Would you add an obese minority to the olympic track team because the minority is underrepresented?
      - killjoywashere 7y ago
        But it's not the Olympic track team, and we know disadvantaged kids placed into an advantaged situation demonstrate an IQ increase and perform up to par. Education is uniquely different from training and certification. I say that as someone who has been through some of the most rigorous programs in both worlds. Education has no immediate impact on the outside world. You don't get to stamp a bridge design as a PE because you went to Stuy and MIT. You have to go through on-the-job training and certification exams. Same for physicians and attorneys. Education is part of it, but you absolutely have to pass the boards to practice. Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team? Also, this is Hacker News, why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here?
        kortilla 7y ago
        You missed the point. Schools are only prestigious because of an expected quality of students. Nobody is clamoring to hire random folks that took free online MIT courses and there is a reason for that. >Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team? I don’t know, a gay Muslim, a queer Christian, what does it matter? Once you’ve started selecting for diversity rather than merit, you’ve failed no matter which minority you choose. >why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here? I don’t care about education, but that’s because in my field it’s relatives easy to check expertise with hands on exercises. But that misses the whole point of the conversation. The only reason anyone cares about education on the hiring side is that it’s supposed to be an intelligence/competency signal. If you just let whoever into the MIT electrical engineering department because their skin is the right color then there really isn’t much to say for the aptitude of MIT EE grads. Finally, if disadvantaged people performed up to par when placed in school and intelligence didn’t matter, then schools could simply save hundreds of thousands of dollars by firing the admissions department and replacing it with a random number generator.
    - anon12345690 7y ago
      no, discrimination doesnt fix discrimination. and real discrimination really doesnt fix imagined discrimination.
- jaredklewis 7y ago
  What ratio of the races can be said to be diverse? At a minimum, wouldn't one need to know the racial breakdown of the applicant pool before being able to conclude that Stuyvesant is not racially diverse? I also don't understand why a three person class with one ethnically Chinese person, one ethnically Arab person, and one ethnically Indian person would be considered to have no racial diversity at all. Why is "Asian" one big race, but (for example) Caucasian and Hispanic two different races? It just seems so arbitrary. Do you have an opinion on Stuyvesant's admission policy? Your comment seems rather pointed but stops short of condemning it.
  - caprese 7y ago
    Yes race is arbitrary but it is easy to catch on to what a society is referring to. Its the lack of black people that people worry about with regard to Stuyvesant. There is a lot of literature on how this comes to be. Fawn over “Pure meritocracy” if you like, the outcome in NYC wasnt expected and isnt leveraging the potential of its society.
  - shaklee3 7y ago
    I don't know the answer, so I was just pointing that out since the word diversity rarely comes with with economics. However, I think that since OP pointed out it's a meritocracy you get kids whose parents really care, and not poor kids whose parents are working all the time. That tends to be cultural to some extent.
- infiniteseeker 7y ago
  Is there such a thing as race or is there not? For years, scientists have told us there is no such thing as race. Also, if one is of mixed race, say white and Asian, are they considered to be from a racially diverse group or are they not?
- websterisk 7y ago
  I'm glad this distinction got teased out. I find that it rarely does. When people discuss the merits of Diversity (capital D), the implication is that they are referring to the value of bringing in people from a variety of walks of life that might bring with them a variety and breadth of unique/disparate experiences to bear and to share. That is not often the case. People want to SEE photographic diversity. Unfortunately, varieties of experiences do not always correlate with varieties of skin color or ethnicity (though, they certainly can). For example, my undergrad institution (a private, competitive engineering school) had a diversity policy that manifested itself in the student body. We had very few "under-represented minorities." The ones we did have were overwhelmingly international and wealthy. It's important to point out that these folks DID bring diversity to the cohort, but it was because they were international, not because they had a certain color of skin. Their wealth actually made them the opposite of diverse economically-speaking. Still, they would always get photographed for the website, brochures, and other marketing material... The brochure would make you think that our school was a bustling melting pot of kids from Philadelphia, Compton, or the south side of Chicago when in fact these folks were kids of Latin American oligarchs and African quasi-royalty. The school needed ACTUAL kids from the south side of Chicago to be able to REALLY check the economic diversity box (and poor white trash like me, of course). In short, economic diversity is no less important than racial diversity. At least for issues where the sharing of experiences and perspectives is the goal, I think it represents a higher bar than brochure-diversity.
  - p1esk 7y ago
    Are you saying that for example if someone's parents make over $150k/year, he better show 800 on SAT, but if the income is less than say $50k, 600 is fine?
    - websterisk 7y ago
      Absolutely not. I suspect that the folks in admissions had more than enough 800's (from all walks of life) to choose from admission-wise. Their balancing act was trying to offer competitive scholarship and aid packages that would seduce the right mix of kids into taking their admission offer over the other admission offers they received. Not an easy task, but an important one! 600's (literally or metaphorically) were a non-starter. Those kids got chewed up and spit out. Putting a perfectly innocent, well-meaning, ambitious high-school grad in that position was not a desirable outcome for anyone.
- anon12345690 7y ago
  or we can stop judging people based on their skin color and move on

by noego 7y ago

shaklee3 7y ago

Economic diversity, yes. But Stuyvesant is 92% white and Asian, which is not racially diverse.

p1esk 7y ago
Are you suggesting they let in people who failed the standardized exam just to improve racial diversity?
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  Perhaps you're not from the US? There is a strong current of sentiment in some quarters of the US that this is exactly what should happen if society's playing field is every going to be leveled.
  - achillesheels 7y ago
    And that’s how bridges collapse.
  - p1esk 7y ago
    I care more about what people on this forum think.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    How does letting in stupid people level the playing field? I want a doctor who is qualified to be a doctor, not someone who got by because they checked a diversity box. The reason graduating from a prestigious school is valuable is because the graduates have some expected level of quality. Letting in stupid people doesn’t do the stupid people much good, and it certainly harms the prestige of an institution that was supposed to be focused on academics. Would you add an obese minority to the olympic track team because the minority is underrepresented?
    - killjoywashere 7y ago
      But it's not the Olympic track team, and we know disadvantaged kids placed into an advantaged situation demonstrate an IQ increase and perform up to par. Education is uniquely different from training and certification. I say that as someone who has been through some of the most rigorous programs in both worlds. Education has no immediate impact on the outside world. You don't get to stamp a bridge design as a PE because you went to Stuy and MIT. You have to go through on-the-job training and certification exams. Same for physicians and attorneys. Education is part of it, but you absolutely have to pass the boards to practice. Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team? Also, this is Hacker News, why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here?
      - kortilla 7y ago
        You missed the point. Schools are only prestigious because of an expected quality of students. Nobody is clamoring to hire random folks that took free online MIT courses and there is a reason for that. >Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team? I don’t know, a gay Muslim, a queer Christian, what does it matter? Once you’ve started selecting for diversity rather than merit, you’ve failed no matter which minority you choose. >why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here? I don’t care about education, but that’s because in my field it’s relatives easy to check expertise with hands on exercises. But that misses the whole point of the conversation. The only reason anyone cares about education on the hiring side is that it’s supposed to be an intelligence/competency signal. If you just let whoever into the MIT electrical engineering department because their skin is the right color then there really isn’t much to say for the aptitude of MIT EE grads. Finally, if disadvantaged people performed up to par when placed in school and intelligence didn’t matter, then schools could simply save hundreds of thousands of dollars by firing the admissions department and replacing it with a random number generator.
  - anon12345690 7y ago
    no, discrimination doesnt fix discrimination. and real discrimination really doesnt fix imagined discrimination.
jaredklewis 7y ago
What ratio of the races can be said to be diverse? At a minimum, wouldn't one need to know the racial breakdown of the applicant pool before being able to conclude that Stuyvesant is not racially diverse? I also don't understand why a three person class with one ethnically Chinese person, one ethnically Arab person, and one ethnically Indian person would be considered to have no racial diversity at all. Why is "Asian" one big race, but (for example) Caucasian and Hispanic two different races? It just seems so arbitrary. Do you have an opinion on Stuyvesant's admission policy? Your comment seems rather pointed but stops short of condemning it.
- caprese 7y ago
  Yes race is arbitrary but it is easy to catch on to what a society is referring to. Its the lack of black people that people worry about with regard to Stuyvesant. There is a lot of literature on how this comes to be. Fawn over “Pure meritocracy” if you like, the outcome in NYC wasnt expected and isnt leveraging the potential of its society.
- shaklee3 7y ago
  I don't know the answer, so I was just pointing that out since the word diversity rarely comes with with economics. However, I think that since OP pointed out it's a meritocracy you get kids whose parents really care, and not poor kids whose parents are working all the time. That tends to be cultural to some extent.
infiniteseeker 7y ago
Is there such a thing as race or is there not? For years, scientists have told us there is no such thing as race. Also, if one is of mixed race, say white and Asian, are they considered to be from a racially diverse group or are they not?
websterisk 7y ago
I'm glad this distinction got teased out. I find that it rarely does. When people discuss the merits of Diversity (capital D), the implication is that they are referring to the value of bringing in people from a variety of walks of life that might bring with them a variety and breadth of unique/disparate experiences to bear and to share. That is not often the case. People want to SEE photographic diversity. Unfortunately, varieties of experiences do not always correlate with varieties of skin color or ethnicity (though, they certainly can). For example, my undergrad institution (a private, competitive engineering school) had a diversity policy that manifested itself in the student body. We had very few "under-represented minorities." The ones we did have were overwhelmingly international and wealthy. It's important to point out that these folks DID bring diversity to the cohort, but it was because they were international, not because they had a certain color of skin. Their wealth actually made them the opposite of diverse economically-speaking. Still, they would always get photographed for the website, brochures, and other marketing material... The brochure would make you think that our school was a bustling melting pot of kids from Philadelphia, Compton, or the south side of Chicago when in fact these folks were kids of Latin American oligarchs and African quasi-royalty. The school needed ACTUAL kids from the south side of Chicago to be able to REALLY check the economic diversity box (and poor white trash like me, of course). In short, economic diversity is no less important than racial diversity. At least for issues where the sharing of experiences and perspectives is the goal, I think it represents a higher bar than brochure-diversity.
- p1esk 7y ago
  Are you saying that for example if someone's parents make over $150k/year, he better show 800 on SAT, but if the income is less than say $50k, 600 is fine?
  - websterisk 7y ago
    Absolutely not. I suspect that the folks in admissions had more than enough 800's (from all walks of life) to choose from admission-wise. Their balancing act was trying to offer competitive scholarship and aid packages that would seduce the right mix of kids into taking their admission offer over the other admission offers they received. Not an easy task, but an important one! 600's (literally or metaphorically) were a non-starter. Those kids got chewed up and spit out. Putting a perfectly innocent, well-meaning, ambitious high-school grad in that position was not a desirable outcome for anyone.
anon12345690 7y ago
or we can stop judging people based on their skin color and move on