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I already talked to my wife about this. I would retire, we would divorce, and I would rent a shitty apartment in East Palo Alto all the while living in our hous

• jachee 7y ago
  How is giving underprivileged people a leg up "punishing" anyone? Privileged people need to start recognizing their inherent pre-rigging of the system. For those in power, equality feels like oppression.
  • GhostVII 7y ago
    Admissions is generally a zero sum game, so whenever you help one group, you hurt everyone else who doesn't have that benefit.
    • jachee 7y ago
      Well, then every privileged person who gets in is "hurting" someone of lesser inherent opportunity. They can use that privilege to spread their applications around to increase their opportunities.
      • GhostVII 7y ago
        Sure, and every non-privileged person who gets in also hurts others who are in the same situation, since they have taken up a spot. The difference is in this case there is an actual policy which is actively punishing people for being in a perceived state of privilege.
        • jachee 7y ago
          Punishing those in privilege is how you achieve equality. They can't give up that inequality voluntarily, and wouldn't if they could.
          • GhostVII 7y ago
            You can also give resources to those who aren't in privilege so they are able to succeed academically, and don't need to have their admission average artificially lowered.
            • fzeroracer 7y ago
              Giving resources is also a zero-sum game. When you're giving more resources to those that aren't privileged, you are in effect denying those same resources for those that are. For example, school admissions. We can provide more funding for underperforming schools, but that is also less funding going towards better performing schools. At a certain point you will have to accept that to help the poor it will mean cutting off certain benefits for more well-off. Then the discussion becomes around how much resources should be shifted around.
              • remote_phone 7y ago
                No. If I can afford to provide my own resources, I’m okay with this. Just like I’m okay paying for social security but not receiving any when I retire. Those that have more resources can afford to take less than those that don’t have enough resources themselves. What I’m not okay with is adjusting scores and denying opportunity because of economic class warfare.
                • jachee 7y ago
                  You seem to be in the minority in that regard. Those that have more resources have historically spent significant amounts of those resources to ensure that they pay in as little of them to anyone else as possible.
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  • remote_phone 7y ago
    Pre-rigging? I’ve worked my ass off for nearly 30 years, as has my wife. We are both smart and very hard working and it paid off. My roots are middle class at best. My parents are immigrants and were extremely poor as children but they also worked hard and went from poverty to middle class. I’m teaching my children to work hard and be good people and contribute to this world. How pray tell am I benefiting from “pre-rigging”? I’ve made solid decisions throughout my life and sacrificed to be where I am today. Now I’m being told that my children will be at a disadvantage for college because my wife and I worked hard our entire careers and succeeded. That’s hogwash. Absolute hogwash and I’m furious.
    • ryanobjc 7y ago
      So, some kids from crappy schools and neighborhoods will get into college, when they might not otherwise, presumably taking the place of you/your children, who have “made solid decisions” and “worked my ass off for 30 years” who deserve it more? Because you/they worked harder? Ok. Cool. Just want to make sure I understand.
      • remote_phone 7y ago
        People who work hard deserve the fruits of their labor, regardless of their economic status. I have no problems with economically disadvantaged hard working people getting into great colleges, I have problems with equally hardworking people being disadvantaged because their parents are successful.
        • ryanobjc 7y ago
          Wouldn’t you agree that two people who achieve the same score on the test may not have worked equally hard? If someone scored the same as your child, except they didn’t have good security, good quality schools, parents that could help them, etc, I would say that they in fact worked much harder than your children. And by the logic of “those who worked harder deserve it more”, well I think you see where this is going. If anything this adversity score IS making things more fair because it’s providing light to the extra challenges someone might have had and thus who indeed worked harder at it.
  • remarkEon 7y ago
    >For those in power, equality feels like oppression. This is a classic Kafka-trap, and I see this rhetorical payload delivered more and more these days. "If you have a problem with changing the status quo, then you're in power and thus deserve to have the status quo changed on you."
    • jachee 7y ago
      If the status quo systematically oppresses one group and benefits another, the beneficiaries of said system will perceive any change to the status quo that would reduce the oppression of the former group as an unfair attack.
      • remarkEon 7y ago
        Nope, not going to play this ridiculous game. And this is a game. I don’t know how or why the modern left started employing the rhetorical tactics mastered by Lenin but here we are.
        • lamarpye 7y ago
          I suspect this is what is taught in college these days. I would add punishing people for hard work seems to be more of a Stalin thing.
      • Mirioron 7y ago
        But it's not systemic oppression. The system doesn't try to keep poor people poor or uneducated. Do poor people have it harder? Yes, but they have many of the same opportunities available to them. The modern world is rich in information that is freely taught. College is signaling in large part, but there are plenty of opprobrious right now where skill beats signaling.
        • okaram 7y ago
          I'm not sure about ascribing desires to 'the system', but let me do so. The system does try to keep some/many people poor and uneducated in many different ways. If you want the most egregious examples, look at how we treat(ed?) blacks and Native Americans ... the system decreed blacks could be slaves up until one generation ago; the system decreed they would get way less legal rights up until 2 generations ago; the system decreed they would not get loans for housing up until at most one generation ago; the system currently harrasses them and puts them in prison ... many features of our school system seems designed to keep poor people uneducated. Many times it is harder to see what is currently going on; so, if you want a more blatant current example, right now, the system is keeping undocumented immigrants poor and uneducated on purpose.
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• enraged_camel 7y ago
  >>I don’t know why my family should be punished because my wife and I worked our asses off to get ahead. Just to offer some general commentary, I think this mentality is probably the root of most of our social ills: people see everything as a "race" and they work hard to "get ahead", and they therefore get angry at policies that attempt to even the playing field because it might help others "catch up".
  • brankoB 7y ago
    It's not an anger at helping others catch up, but an anger at pulling people back. We can help people who are behind without sacrificing the people who are already ahead.
    • berbec 7y ago
      Isn't it both? There are only X spots per school. Every person being helped up and admitted is someone being pulled back and denied. I have no opinion on this debate, but school admissions are a zero-sum-game, afaik.
      • brankoB 7y ago
        In terms of school admissions I would agree. In terms of society in general however i'm not entirely convinced that it's a zero sum game.
        • Dylan16807 7y ago
          Oh in terms of something like money, taking X dollars from the richest and using it to help the poorest is extremely positive sum. This might be true for college admissions too, if you're flush with opportunities you're still ahead if you lose one. But there's still an aspect of "pulling people back". It's a hard tradeoff to design. But if you do it right you really can make something with better outcomes and more fairness, even if some will call it an abomination.
        • CydeWeys 7y ago
• sjy 7y ago
  Choosing to get a fake divorce so that you can game the system as much as possible isn't punishment; it's probably fraud. You could also choose to relax and let your children enjoy all the other benefits of a great upbringing, and accept that "the children of hardworking parents should be more likely to be admitted" isn't a design goal of the admissions system.
  • gay-divorce 7y ago
    I mean, what's the difference between being legally separated, getting a divorce on paper and then living common law? Is an arranged marriage a fraud too? What if you get married for citizenship and then fall in love? Why aren't gay partners subject to common law divorce precedents?
  • thinkingemote 7y ago
    They are saying they will get a real divorce but just live together after.
  • wanderer2323 7y ago
    Resisting an abusive and insanely overreaching government system is not 'fraud' morally and it probably won't be one legally.
    • astura 7y ago
      The SAT is administered by College Board which is an entirely private institution.
      • pacala 7y ago
        The federally & state funded public Universities that will fall over each other to employ adversity scores as a pillar of their academic life, on the other hand... One can attempt to outsource responsibility from a legalistic perspective, but from a moral perspective one can't escape it.
        • 7y ago
• gnicholas 7y ago
  I recently heard of a high earning family that bought a rental/investment property in EPA, then when their kid got into the Tinsley program (school busing from EPA to Palo Alto/Menlo/Portola/Woodside) they decided to move there full time. Their kid now goes to a fancy school and they live in a development in EPA near Facebook HQ. So to all the naysayers, people are already doing crazy stuff like this to help their kids.
  • savrajsingh 7y ago
    Perhaps a side benefit of this crazy score is forced gentrification of all areas until their score falls to 50 /s
    • gnicholas 7y ago
      Or it will just drive up rents in low-income areas, as wealthy parents rent (but do not live in) apartments in order to game this system.
      • lazyasciiart 7y ago
        School zoning is a pretty insanely high-stakes thing, and other parents will absolutely rat them out and provide evidence. Parents have been jailed for using an address they don't live at - https://abcnews.go.com/US/ohio-mom-jailed-sending-kids-school-district/story?id=12763654 https://abcnews.go.com/US/ohio-mom-jailed-sending-kids-schoo...
        • gnicholas 7y ago
          Sure, that's when you're publicly defrauding a school, and other parents know that you don't really live there. It would be much easier to game this system since you are only reporting your address to the College Board, and no other students/parents would have reason to know that you're not reporting valid information.
• robotresearcher 7y ago
  I understand the feeling, but how about if we rephrase it from another viewpoint: I don’t know why I should be punished because my parents didn’t succeed financially. I work hard in highschool but don’t have extra private tutoring or parents who can help me with calculus homework. I’m hard working and bright but how can I compete with kids from Saratoga High School where everyone’s parents went to MIT/Penn and work at Apple/Google[1]? I read library books and watch Khan Academy, but no one in my family ever went to college. Why does my parents’ achievement have a fundamental impact on my opportunities? Somehow we have to aim for equality of opportunity. It’s difficult to achieve but can’t we agree on this as a goal? Opportunity should not be inherited. My kids are as good as yours, as the next person’s, independent of how hard we worked. [1] hyperbole. Saratoga parents from UCLA/CMU who work at Netflix/NVIDIA I’m talking about you too.
  • Glyptodon 7y ago
    Keep in mind that given 1000 admission slots and 1000 very smart poor/disadvantaged kids and 1000 average rich kids most institutions will never admit all the 1000 poor/disadvantaged kids (though the absolute smartest and absolute richest will probably have a leg up). Colleges are gatekeeper institutions that want to identify the worst off person that's still likely to have high success so that they can talk about how great their programs and commitment to diversity are while still mostly admitting wealthy folks and raking in money for their foundations and endowments. And so that they can point to those successes as proof that they're serving a social interest by anecdote, regardless of what the actual numbers on social mobility say. It's really at level very removed from what you bring up. It's not that you're being punished because your parents are not part of the oligarch class. Rather, the oligarch class wants higher education to be a system that primarily benefits themselves while making it palatable by marketing the whole thing as a societal benefit. Some colleges have become attuned to the fact that people caught on to this, which is why some elite institutions advertise that they're "need blind," a phrase which is more marketing than reality. They know that they can admit many middle class people and have them turn down "affordable" packages that are actually very draining for financially responsible families. And they know that they can calibrate their admissions to get exactly the amount and quality of disadvantaged students they want to mix with their legacy and elite admits, which will leave the majority of admits upper class and elite ("need blind" might as well be a synonym for "oligarchs are meritorious"). This is the game because elites have succeeded in twisting the system to benefit them. And the game now is to convince the public at large is that they should keep a system created for the oligarchy in place while putting lipstick on it. If you want to shatter this state of affairs, the #1 thing you can do is start treating elite institutions and their graduates with the social stigma they deserve. It's also worth keeping in mind that a significant reason this happens is because of admissions decisions revolving around institutional interests rather than societal interests, which means putting admit decisions in the hands of a body that does not represent the institution(s) in question could also be another route towards addressing what you bring up.
• dragonwriter 7y ago
  > I already talked to my wife about this. I would retire, we would divorce, and I would rent a shitty apartment in East Palo Alto all the while living in our house. And that's why thet won't reveal the detailed factors, the time windows over which they are evaluated, and their weighting. > If they think they can boil my kids into a single number without bothering to find the context of who my kids are then I will game it to as much as possible. They don't. In fact, that seems to be exactly the problem this addresses, since with this the SAT would no longer be boiling kids into a single number, and it would be incorporating more context than the status quo.
• PascLeRasc 7y ago
  Did you read this part of the article? "The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker." Do what you want, but it doesn't seem like this will be any different from writing about adversity in an application essay. Schools can choose how much they want to weigh the score.