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Top colleges should select randomly from a pool of ‘good enough’ (2005)

• ForHackernews 6y ago
  Yes. This is a fantastic idea that would reduce stress for thousands of students, elegantly address questions of unfairness, and take wind out of the sails of people who think their admission to $PoshUni proves them to be a better calibre of person. For all these reasons, I cannot possibly imagine the ruling class would allow this to happen.
• kokooo 6y ago
  College should be a meritocracy, it's just that we want people to be able to be able to afford it and not be shit out of luck if they can't go to it. This would also reduce stress as you don't have to worry about not getting into a college if you know your life is going to turn out fine either way. Why has this goal been malformed and twisted around to the point where people are coming up with any solution that doesn't involve tackling the cost and the career issue?
  • rusty-rust 6y ago
    I think your argument is engaging in “what aboutism” and detracts from the issue this article is trying to address. The problem they are trying to address is that true meritocracy only exists in a perfect system, that is to say that you can not fairly compare individuals across different environments. More concretely one of the problems it is trying to account for the situations where wealth or post code privilege gives students an advantage over other students. There are often situations where students just performed better on a standardized test because they could afford a couch or had better teachers and not because they are “smarter” or more capable.
    • MagnumOpus 6y ago
      > There are often situations where students just performed better on a standardized test because they could afford a couch or had better teachers and not because they are “smarter” or more capable The solution is to make sure that students have good teachers and a couch (??) to become more capable, and not to waste limited elite teaching resource on less-capable students.
      • intended 6y ago
        Impoverished regions are always going to have lower than average outcomes. If you could afford enough teachers, with good training, on a impoverished region tax base, it would be revolutionary.
      • afarrell 6y ago
        No university can boil the ocean. In order to make sure that students have good teachers, one challenge is making it possible for people from impoverished communities to be able to get high-quality schooling so that they can either become teachers or earn money that can go back into those communities.
    • rhino369 6y ago
      There is also a question of how to define "merit." Standardized tests aren't that meaningful or accurate. It's a good way to roughly separate people out, but it shouldn't be considered merit. Especially since people spend a bunch of time learning strategies for it, further reducing its predictive ability.
  • gberger 6y ago
    I disagree that college should be a pure meritocracy. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds would have a really hard time getting into college, even though many are extremely smart and have great potential to succeed at college. Meritocracy is biased towards the privileged.
    • andrepd 6y ago
      When that is the definition of meritocracy, I agree. But for me, true meritocracy implies an even playing field for everyone, and proper measures taken to correct it when it's uneven. In turn this implies: huge and long-term investments in public education, not to mention myriad other social reforms. Much more work than just giving everybody the same test and calling it a day, and calling that "meritocracy".
    • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > Students from disadvantaged backgrounds would have a really hard time getting into college, even though many are extremely smart and have great potential to succeed at college If they’re smart and have potential to succeed, a meritocratic measure should rank them favourably. The problems with tipping the scales too far are (1) it’s inefficient, in that the total likely production of the student body is lowered and (2) it can backfire, by visibly creating a two-tier student body between those admitted on their own merits and those admitted for other reasons. In the United States, we tend to tip the scale towards privilege through legacy admissions and institutional advancement programs. We also tip them towards social goals through affirmative action.
      • abdullahkhalids 6y ago
        Both my undergrad uni, and the university I am teaching at, in Pakistan, have an outreach program, where they find ~50 excellent students from the poorest sections of society, and give them a full ride (tuition + living expenses). Some of these students would not even have gone to any uni, let alone to some of the best unis in the countries. Based on my non-statistical observational view, these programs are insanely effective at helping these students. Hell, some of the best students in the uni are exactly these poor students. The most successful student from my batch grew up in a village in the middle of nowhere and went to MIT for a physics PhD. I have seen very little evidence of two-tier because some of the privileged are lazy and don't achieve much in uni.
  • ForHackernews 6y ago
    You're assuming that standardized testing procedures, high school grading, and college admissions officers have the precision necessary to correctly distinguish between the 99.9997% perfect candidate and the 99.9998% perfect candidate. All I can say is that's nuts. I got a perfect score on my ACT, and I know for a fact that I guessed on some questions. Am I really a stronger applicant than somebody else who made less-lucky guesses? There's a garbage-in/garbage-out problem here where people who desperately want "meritocracy" are deluding themselves into believing they can accurately identify "merit" down to some extremely fine precision.
    • johnjj257 6y ago
      > Am I really a stronger applicant than somebody else who made less-lucky guesses? No but that's just dumb luck. In general it will average out somehow cares about getting it 100% perfect?
    • AstralStorm 6y ago
      Single sample estimation is never that good. Even were the tests perfect, rich people and ones with additional free time can take more attempts with reduced cost to themselves and families. Additionally, tests are extremely time boxed, while actual research work is much more lax. Tests also do not measure cooperation, a crucial thing in real life research and development. Speed is not necessarily quality, and we don't know how correlated it is.
      • murgindrag 6y ago
        75 years of test validity research say we DO know how correlated tests are with every conceivable definition of "quality." Your comment suggests you just haven't bothered to look. Multiple attempts on tests don't help very much. We have 75 years of reliability research to show that. It's not single sample estimation. It's a couple hours to collect A LOT of samples. Of course, money for tutoring, better schools, and highly-educated parents help with test outcomes and are a barrier to socioeconomic mobility. The basic problem is, random selection aside, no one has proposed a fairer system. Read Animal Farm at some point to see what happens when you have revolutions against an unfair system, without proposing something better to take its place.. But my basic point is you're confusing things YOU don't know with things WE don't know. We know a lot about tests, their upsides, their downsides, and alternatives. It's not like there aren't scientific conferences on this stuff.
  • notacoward 6y ago
    Meritocracy does not require strict ranking of individuals. Selecting cohorts instead of individuals is still meritocracy. You could use weighted probabilities, with higher scores meaning higher probabilities but still short of certainty, and it would still be meritocracy. The OP's point is that when measurement error is as large as it is for college admissions, using a simple lottery to narrow the cohort is as good as any other method wrt getting the best students, and better in terms of fairness/diversity. Not saying it's correct, or that "meritocracy" as it exists now is something we must preserve, but "it's not meritocracy" isn't true.
    • username90 6y ago
      > The OP's point is that when measurement error is as large as it is for college admissions, using a simple lottery to narrow the cohort is as good as any other method wrt getting the best students Not really. Lets say every student scores within 10 percentage point of their true "merit". So if you only pick the top 1% scorers you actually could get students down in the top 11%. So why not just pick top 11% by random? Because when you pick a top 11% scorer you extend your range so you now could get as low as top 21%. Ranking them still matters quite a lot even if error range is larger than their pick range.
      • rhino369 6y ago
        You can pick a different random set of inputs and come to the opposite conclusion. It could be true that there is no correlation between true "merit" and test scores when you get to, say, the 99%th percentile. Especially since the predictive ability of these tests must be suspect now that you can study strategies for them. In that situation, Harvard shouldn't value a 1600 any more than a 1540.
• j7ake 6y ago
  There is discussion of these partial lotteries in academia as a way to improve the procedure of getting grant money. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000065 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
  • 2sk21 6y ago
    Malcom Gladwell touched upon this in a recent episode of his podcast http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revolution http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revo...
  • pattusk 6y ago
    This is generally known as sortition and was common in the ancient world. I've always felt it modern democratic politics would benefit greatly from such a system. I'm not sure the same is true of academia, you want students good enough that they do not risk failing at an elite institution, but when setting the threshold for "good enough" it's easy to reproduce the same inequalities you were trying to avoid in the first place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
    • slaymaker1907 6y ago
      I think the point is that the underlying metrics have a degree of randomness which we need to recognize. Instead of just deciding what is good enough to make it at Harvard and have that be the cutoff, you could certainly set the cutoff higher but still have randomness after that point. Don’t introduce arbitrary sorting when that is really not possible. I TA’d a class where we used a grading metric sort of like this. It turns out that it is a lot easier to grade assignments by grouping them into 5 buckets than it is to give an extremely precise point value to everything.
• chancemehmu 6y ago
  They already pretty much do
• fnord123 6y ago
  lol, why would they do that? Then they will be found out since the differentiator between the top pool of 'good enough' undergraduate programs is merely being able to play king maker to students who were going to go far in life anyway. And in return, the top students help brand the university as being top.
  • nmeofthestate 6y ago
    > lol, why would they do that? Basically, using academic aptitude as an entrance qualification includes/excludes different races unevenly, (Asians and Whites do better) so this is a way to get round that. Lowering the standards and using randomness is a roundabout way to discriminate against Asians and Whites, but not explicitly. Of course, another way of looking at it is that tests are racist because of the variation in results.
    • fnord123 6y ago
      I understand that. My point is that Universities have a brand for taking top tier raw undergrad students and moulding them into elite graduates who lead the world. In reality, many of those top tier students would succeed no matter what (raw talent, sheer will, family connections, etc). If you dilute the pool in a meaningful way then 5% of the top 10k students go to Top Tier Uni 1; 5% to Top Tier Uni 2, ... Top Tier Uni 20. In ten years the outcomes of the students will no longer be biased towards Top Tier Uni 1 since students were dispersed across the top 20. Instead they are spread uniformly across the top 20. Why would TTU1 agree to lose their #1 place? This is predicated on the reasonable belief that the Top 20 Undergraduate programmes are all 'good enough'.
    • BobbyJo 6y ago
      Would it actually discriminate against Whites and Asians though? The pool of 'good enough' is likely very White/Asian.
• duncan_bayne 6y ago
  Absolutely. Because we want our doctors and engineers to be just "good enough", none of this elitism for us! I'm sure they'll still cure cancer and get us to Mars, right? And the truly elite who miss out by random chance ... that doesn't matter because justice doesn't require us to recognise and appropriately reward genius. In fact, screw those priviliged geniuses, they're only first in line because they won a genetic lottery right? /s
  • pinkfoot 6y ago
    I upvoted you, but it is true that for most graduates, a degree is just a ticket to the upper middle class where they will mostly do meetings, email, and office documents. Sadly, this is true for a lot of engineering jobs too. Whether they learn anything is irrelevant.
    • duncan_bayne 6y ago
      That's true. But, bluntly, and speaking as a member, we don't matter anywhere near as much as the absolute best. The members of the "upper middle class ticket" group might as well be selected by ballot from the intellectually qualified. But I'd never suggest that if it in any way imperiled the idenfitifcation and support of the very best and brightest. Which, AFAICT, is exactly what this proposal would do.
  • strikelaserclaw 6y ago
    i think the point the article was trying to make is that good enough is a much more quantifiable metric and randomization after that is better at minimizing bias from those who select who is "special." I think of it more like, everyone with a 1500 sat go into a hat, and we pick 20 randomly, rather than lets put everyone with a sat score of 1000 in a hat because that is "good enough."
  • tfehring 6y ago
    It's not obvious that the current process does better than chance at detecting genius, though - at the margin, the formal and informal tests used for admissions are far better predictors of your parents' tax bracket than of your own inherent ability.
• nihakue 6y ago
  Or do something like https://www.npr.org/transcripts/793488868?t=1598260732452 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/793488868?t=1598260732452 which allocates a pool of spots each for lottery, pay-to-win, volunteer-to-win, and meritocracy-to-win. I think this way, everyone is happy.
• sunseb 6y ago
  The world need more Meritocracy instead of this Marxist delusion. We need greatness, not "good enough"!
  • ggm 6y ago
    Selecting randomly from a cohort already judged good enough is a meritocracy. Perhaps you prefer the French model with a linear ranking nationwide and a cap on how many thousands down from the top can go to the ecole normale superieur?
    • Google234 6y ago
      What’s wrong with that? Also there’s has to be a cap somewhere in the process.
      • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
        > What’s wrong with that? It’s using a ruler to aim an electron microscope. Standardised tests measure academic potential, i.e. probability of graduating and likely value added to society from the educational experience, with a fair amount of error. Taking everyone within a standard deviation of the cut-off and randomly selecting therefrom admits this error and removes the stigma from those just below the previous, false cut-off. If one really wanted, and if the statistics merited it, one could use a weighted randomisation, with individuals scoring higher getting an advantage compared to those scoring lower.
        • iguy 6y ago
          > randomly selecting therefrom admits this error Well, it enlarges the error. All you have done is to add an additional source of noise on top of the existing one. > and removes the stigma from those just below the previous, false cut-off This it may do, it may well be psychologically easier to accept that you got unlucky on the coin flip rather than unlucky on which topic came up in question 13. (Not sure what "false" means, the cut-off is a fact of how the system works.)
• chii 6y ago
  education is not a scarce goods - why not accept _all_ candidates that are good enough? The cost of educating one more student is marginal, and if there's a large enough number, economies of scale can kick in as well.
  • blackbear_ 6y ago
    Works for a bachelor but fails for a PhD, where students need to have a much closer relationship with their professors.
    • Broken_Hippo 6y ago
      If we simply cannot accept the PhD students that qualify and are willing, then maybe we are doing it wrong.
      • avani 6y ago
        "qualify" is nebulous. When professors accept PhDs, they are looking for people who they want working in their specific labs. It is much more like applying to a job than applying to undergrad. I have pulled candidates from the pile who had sub-par test scores but excellent writing skills, for instance, because teaching good writing to adults is much harder for me than teaching computer science. Similarly, I've taken students who reached out to me with ideas for followup on my papers over students with great test scores who didn't seem to care what they worked on. Random sampling is a terrible strategy for PhD admissions.
  • Aerroon 6y ago
    >education is not a scarce goods Education itself is not, but going to a top college is not the same as getting an education. If Bryan Caplan's idea of college being mostly about signaling[0] is true, then top colleges can't scale. They are an exclusive club and a lot of the benefits of top colleges come from being exclusive. Opening it up to more people reduces these benefits for the students. [0] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education-credentials-20180211-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education...
• SrslyJosh 6y ago
  Let's take it further. Colleges should be government-funded, and their level of discretionary funding should be based on how they are rated by their students and an independent assessment of their students' skills and general knowledge (to be administered before and after attending).
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > government-funded...based on...an independent assessment of their students' skills and general knowledge This would compress the wide spectrum of American college experiences into a single state-mandated standardised test-driven program.
    • donw 6y ago
      Germany seems to do very well with this approach.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    While there's something to be salvaged from your idea (I was amazed when some of my expensive courses were taught by a TA, and one we couldn't even understand), unis aren't just vocational schools. One of the most important classes I took during my engineering degree was a philosophy 101 course I procrastinated until my last semester. 11 years later I somehow still periodically get to talk about Callicles (from Gorgias) with a stranger at a bar—it's happened twice—, and it's generally awakened me to reading philosophy, something I assumed was dull and impenetrable. I have no idea how any of that could be measured on a standardized test, and it would be a shame if it was dropped from curriculum just because it can't easily be measured. Uni is more than a vocational school that prepares us for the work camp.
    • donw 6y ago
      That's great. You should be able to take those classes if you want to. Near-as-makes-no-difference half of the classes I was required to take in university -- my upper- and lower-division "general education" -- were an absolute waste of time for which I was forced to pay. Even if I was forced to spend that money, I would have been better served by pretty much any other experience that carried an equivalent cost -- like spending a year backpacking in Europe and Asia.
• hliyan 6y ago
  Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is inevitable."
  • znpy 6y ago
    That's an enlightening comment, thank you.
  • puranjay 6y ago
    Most signifiers of merit, outside of academics (I'd argue even including academics), require a certain amount of privilege. You can't volunteer or take piano lessons or play sports seriously if you have to help out around the house because you're living in a single parent household where the parent has to hold two jobs to make ends meet.
  • giantDinosaur 6y ago
    Right - but are we talking the 'merit' of billionaires or the 'merit' of being an engineer who can pass difficult math exams? Totally different things, and conflating them is not helpful.
    • hliyan 6y ago
      Take two individuals with the aptitude and the willingness to learn engineering and pass said exam. Give one person enough money to pursue an engineering degree. Burden the other one with an ailing parent. There is no conflation here.
      • AndrewDucker 6y ago
        Similarly. Take two people with the aptitude. Have them both spend a year messing about. One of them has a family who can afford to help them get back on track, the other doesn't. I'm doing really well despite falling off the rails a bit in my early 20s. If I didn't have my family to help me, I'd not be doing nearly as well.
• JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  We have lower-hanging fruit. If a college accepts students taking government-subsidised loans, or otherwise receives any federal funding, it should not be permitted to consider legacy [1] or institutional advancement for admissions. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences
  • murgindrag 6y ago
    I mean, the basic idea behind an elite school is you have: * A community of rich folks who get to look smart-by-association * A community of smart folks who get networked into the power networks All the decision-makers would lose out on this. Why would this even fly? George Bush Jr went to Yale and Harvard. He looked smart. And, a bunch of people were friends with the President. Folks like him make the laws.
    • newen 6y ago
      The fact that GWB went to Yale made it possible for him to become President. Elite schools make it easier for people who have money (but aren’t too academically inclined) to get into positions of political power by building credentials and connecting with a community of smart people.
      • murgindrag 6y ago
        Isn't that exactly what I wrote? The whole point of elite schools is to give rich people appearance of intelligence by association. If you take 2000 valedictorians and 500 rich douchebags, have the 500 rich douchebags pay to educate the whole lot, and everyone comes out with a common brand stamp, who benefits? Answer: Everyone involved! Taking away federal funding (as if that were politically possible) would slow it down a little bit, but the rich douchebags are really, really rich. They'll just pay a little bit more. I don't know how you're going to stop that without a totalitarian state.
        • rjkennedy98 6y ago
• kepler1 6y ago
  I know the person's intentions are good in putting forth such an idea, but the problem with intentions is that they're always good. But they often ignore the bad side effects of the idea when it comes to putting it into practice. First, let's not mince words here -- this suggested policy is about lowering the bar for admission to top universities so that some previously unqualified tier of applicants has a better shot at getting in. These lower tier students get a better chance in a lottery, at the expense of people who through better work/aptitude/achievement/(and no small amount of luck, finance, or legacy also) would otherwise usually get in with high likelihood. (Note, those last exceptional categories are a small portion -- something like 10%.) So what's one of the side effects here? Or let's call it incentives produced by such a system? Well, perhaps it's that students, who throughout school are taught to study hard, do well, apply themselves, at the end face a selection that tosses that out the window and says, well, everyone is equally good and we're going to do a lottery. We're lowering the bar so that everyone who got above a B average has an equal chance of getting into Harvard. Is that teaching them the right lesson? Is that incentivizing people to excel and be really good at something? How would you respond at work if at the end of the year, everyone doing a minimum amount of work were given the same salary? I don't think you'd actually like that (most people reading these forums, at least). Now, I don't dispute that there's a lot of unnecessary pressure on students today. And part of it is a bigger problem that the population has grown while top spots have stayed relatively constant. So people are trying to fix this. But I disagree with attempts to create artificial equality at the last step. We wouldn't accept this for anything else that matters -- you wouldn't prefer to be treated by a doctor who was just "good enough", or be flown by a pilot who barely passed the flight exam. In the name of lowering their level of stress, or making the doctor / pilot population look a certain way. And by the way, to make a difference in college admissions (according to the function I can imagine the author desires), you really have to lower the bar a lot. I don't want these kinds of distortions for a system that my kids will be subject to. That's not the lesson I want them to learn. Students in other countries have a far harder and more competitive time than ours. I don't want them to wake up to that reality only when it comes time to apply for their first job and find themselves falling flat.
  • compsciphd 6y ago
    people say that Ivy's get such a large number of applicants and accept such a small percentage that they could take their applicant pool, accept one cohort, put it aside, accept another cohort and the 2nd cohort would be just as successful as the first cohort. If that is true, its not about lowering the bar, as both cohort pass the same bar, its just about increasing fairness. if its not true, then yes, you are correct, it lowers the bar.
• known 6y ago
  30% Law makers are selected via Lottery in Belgium https://archive.is/vMt1d https://archive.is/vMt1d
  • samatman 6y ago
    From the article, this is a proposal, not an extant policy.
• 34679 6y ago
  Top colleges should stop treating admissions like a limited release beer - driving up prices with intentional shortages - and build some damn classrooms.
  • AstralStorm 6y ago
    Getting enough teaching staff and laboratory space is expensive and exponentially harder to manage. Plus you will need support such as cheap mass housing. Then on top of that, big mass transport. It's not insurmountable, and quite a lot a chicken and egg problem. The most important part is, what do you do with drop outs? Or with people who try and cannot find fit? How do you handle people who have to quit for personal or family reasons, who suddenly now are concentrated on one place near the university?
    • lopmotr 6y ago
      That would only be a problem if the expansion didn't pay for itself. Maybe it won't pay for itself if it dilutes their brand. Businesses that aren't based on restricted supply are often expanding. That's how you make more money!
  • murgindrag 6y ago
    The only difference between top colleges and not-so-top colleges is admissions and endowment.
    • ausbah 6y ago
      and research output, the academic quality of the average student, class sizes, and more
      • LegitShady 6y ago
        those are side affects of the two things he mentioned, not policy.
      • murgindrag 6y ago
• Melting_Harps 6y ago
  I recently heard a podcast with Andrew Yang and Scott Galloway (professor at NYU) [1] and the summary was pretty much that he attended UCLA at a time that it was not only affordable, but also when they were willing to take on local students with less than stellar or 'good enough' backgrounds, in order to remain apt to the articles title, as the lower acceptance rate wasn't something that added to the institutions supposed prestige. I think this underscores what happens when a supposed Social Good (which is funded as such at both a State and Federal Level) is used to primarily serve as a state-subsidized monetization scheme on it's Brand which will bend backwards to maximize its profits with International Students. I sincerely believe this is what inevitably comes when Education is centralized and is reduced to serve as an expensive commodity in the form of virtue signalling rather than serve as an actual institution of Higher Education for it's populace. And this needs to be understood before any reform to accommodate people who really shouldn't be there, which is quite honestly a large percentage of students with University degrees, before anything is undertaken. I personally wanted to walk away when I realized what a farce University had become and I had to be talked into going back to class after I got Honors in Philosophy and told I'd get all expenses paid to debate moral ethics, all while I was a Biology major struggling to get classes to advance to Junior status and transfer to a CSU campus with more STEM based offerings only to get hit with budget and strikes when I transferred that resulted in even less course availability due to the financial crises. Personally, I'm really enjoying seeing how quickly the disruption has occurred to Higher Education in the US, and the UK as you can now get some degrees for pre-2000s prices on Coursera. College of London offers an Online Bsc CS degree for $17k, and CU Boulder offers an MSc EE for ~$20k. I paid 65k for BSc at a CSU and graduated in 2009. And while I'd love to see a further race to the bottom in terms of pricing, I take solace in that they know that its inevitable. CU Boulder recently allowed students to move in last week, and in that time 13 people have tested positive for COVID on campus, and one has died in the county in that time [2]. But it must be said, if you're really thinking going for the 'Campus Life' during this pandemic than I'm afraid to say no prestigious degree is going to save you from the Real World when it comes crashing down and you have no real understanding of cost-risk-benefit analysis. It must also be noted that the only classes offered on campus right now are for things like Latin according to an interviewed student. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gESwwG9sa2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gESwwG9sa2Y 2: https://www.timescall.com/2020/08/21/cu-boulder-now-up-to-13-positive-coronavirus-cases-for-move-in-week/ https://www.timescall.com/2020/08/21/cu-boulder-now-up-to-13...
• sradman 6y ago
  This is a 2005 article by Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
• Yc4win 6y ago
  Colleges are in for an extremely rude awakening. No more int'l student tuition coupled with the fact that most people don't need college anymore when you can learn better than some two-bit "professor" could teach you with just a set of instructional videos. Add in a take home exam and now you are running your own ivy league education for free.
• abeppu 6y ago
  A bunch of commenters here have gotten fixated on two questions: (a) "meritocracy" and what it means or should mean and (b) whether the value of top colleges derives mainly from being exclusive. I think an interesting / illustrative case is the AMA as the credentialing authority for medical schools. An association of people in the profession, who have a clear interest in the supply of doctors being low, has a clear lever by which to restrain the future supply of doctors. Independent of which specific people get in and how, for the country overall, most of us would probably be better off if more people got into med school, if there were more med schools, and there were just more doctors working a decade from now. The important question isn't just who should get the seat, but which policy choice gives us a better health care system. I'm guessing the same is true for other areas, but it's just less clear. Rather than asking "who gets to go to the best schools", more interesting is "what policies at the best schools give us a country we want to live in a generation from now?" or "what choice yields the greatest benefit, not just to the student, but to society?" And if schools don't want to make choices from that perspective, if they want to operate like luxury brands whose goods are valued mostly because they're rare ... then maybe they shouldn't get tax exemptions around their endowments, or public funds, or the respect and esteem of a population that thinks they serve some higher, refined purpose.
  • mikeyouse 6y ago
    The AMA doesn't restrict the number of people in medical school, you're thinking of residency slots, and they don't restrict that either. They're in favor of expanding the number of residencies available since everyone knows there is a shortage of doctors. The restriction comes from funding since it's all Federal dollars to pay for the training. https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-builds-efforts-expand-funding-graduate-medical-education-0 https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-bui... Congress, and more specifically right now, the Republican Senate is the only thing holding up funding tens of thousands of more slots (the bills are cosponsored by ~130 congresspeople, of which 100+ are Democrats and by 17 Senators, of which 15 are Democrats) https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2267/cosponsors?searchResultViewType=expanded https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2267... https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1301 https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/130...
• dr_dshiv 6y ago
  I like this random selection because it will be a natural lottery allowing for a determination of the effects of the school on life outcomes.
• hardwaregeek 6y ago
  One interesting example is the UT system. Because affirmative action was banned in Hopwood v. Texas, the UT system resorted to a program where they accept the top 10% of each high school's class into all UT schools. It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic. What I like about this system is that it helps a population that even the most altruistically inclined admissions office overlooks: the unprepared. I've met my fair share of students who are brilliant, hard workers but just do not play the game. Whether that's because of ignorance, fear of failure or some other factor, I do not know. They exist at every level; I've seen them for college, for tech jobs, probably for high school admissions. If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile.
  • tyingq 6y ago
    "they accept the top 10% of each high school's class into all UT schools" Sort of. Most of them that want to go to UT want UT Austin. There's not enough room there for all of them.
    • eindiran 6y ago
      This is also how the UC system works: the top 9% (IIRC) students are eligible for guaranteed admission, but they are not necessarily admitted to the campus or program of their choice, so you might not get to go to eg Berkeley.
      • tzs 6y ago
        Do they take into account what you intend to major in? Not all UC campuses offer all degrees. If you are in that 9% and want to major in, say, mathematics, will they try to make sure that you get into one of the campuses that offers that?
• jakub_g 6y ago
  FWIW in France until last year, admission to most universities (except the top ones) was through a draw ('tirage au sort à l'université'). It's been changed last year though not without controversies. I don't know the historical context though about why and how it's been this way.
• ghaff 6y ago
  >randomly from a pool of good enough It's probably closer to that today than most would care to publicly admit. Oh, they don't roll a dice but they mostly have some sort of academic cutoff and then decide on admissions from the remaining pool by lots of factors aiming for a diverse student body across many somewhat arbitrary dimensions. A handful may be slam-dunks above a certain floor (star athlete, parents donated a building, did some amazing humanitarian project in high school). But for the most part, there is a lot of randomness among the admissions of solidly good-enough students.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  Quantifying "good enough" is not easy. I work in higher ed analytics. For even a mildly selective school that accepts 40-60% of it's students, there's certainly a group that are very likely "accepts", a group that are very likely "rejects", but 15-20% in the middle require very close review and interpretation of academic trends, non-cognitive attributes, how hard they pushed themselves, and more. The more selective a school gets, the more applicants meet sone easy to quantify metrics, and the more that close review becomes necessary for making all decisions. It is a problem that such room for professional judgement introduces room for bias and unfairness. But a random selection based on one-dimensional metrics isn't really the solution: sound training and transparency into the decision-making process would be good start in resolving these problems, though probably just a start.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  > Should Select Randomly From a Pool of ‘Good Enough’ But... they already do. I can't find links right now, but deans of admissions from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. all talk about how they could admit 10x the students and they'd all be equally good. And that their selections aren't exactly "random" but are focused on diversity: that there are enough players for each instrument in the orchestra, athletes for each sport, varied extracurriculars in general, students for each major, with a diversity of race, ethnicity, nationality, geography, and so on. That early-decision candidates obviously have a bigger chance, etc. But for a student who gets into Harvard and Princeton but not Yale or Columbia, it is essentially random -- e.g. Harvard and Princeton hadn't allotted all their trumpet players already but Yale and Columbia did.
  • lozaning 6y ago
    Of all the kids in my IB class in high school, the kid that played the bassoon got into more schools than any of the rest of us, even with moderately worse grades.
• JoshuaDavid 6y ago
  One point about this that I think is overlooked is that if you don't include some sort of randomness, you'll end up over-optimizing for whatever you're measuring, and under-optimizing for the thing you actually care about. More concretely, if we say that there are some underlying factors which correlate to both student "quality" and to admissions scores, and some random factors, we'll find that score and quality are correlated, but the highest quality students and the ones with the highest scores aren't the same ones. This is easier to explain using a graph: if we assume that "score" and "quality" are two gaussian variables, we get a graph that looks like 16 ^ Quality 15 | #####BBBB 14 | ########BBBBA 13 | ###########BBBBAA 12 | #############BBBBAA 11 | ###############CCCCAA 10 | #################CCCCAA 9 | ##################CCCCA 8 | ###################CCCC 7 | ####################CCC 6 | #####################CC 5 | ##################### 4 | ################### 3 | ################# 2 | ############# 1 | ######### +----+----+----+----+----+----+> 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 Score If you do the naive thing, and grab the very highest-scoring students, we set the cutoff at 27, and get all 10 of the students labeled by A in the above diagram, thus have a quality distribution of 10 - 14, with the bulk being around 10 - 13, and the average score being 11.5. If we instead set the cutoff at 23, we get 47 students (labelled B for students above the average of the originally selected ones, and C for the ones below that average) -- if we then pick among them randomly, we'll get a flatter distribution ranging from a low score of 6 to a high score of 15, with an average of 10.98. The distribution of scores looks like Score | Strict | Cutoff/ | Cutoff | Random ------+--------+-------- 15 | 0.00% | 8.51% 14 | 10.00% | 10.64% 13 | 20.00% | 12.77% 12 | 20.00% | 12.77% 11 | 20.00% | 12.77% 10 | 20.00% | 12.77% 9 | 10.00% | 10.64% 8 | 0.00% | 8.51% 7 | 0.00% | 6.38% 6 | 0.00% | 4.26% So if you care a lot about simply not getting bad students, and not very much about getting the very best ones, you should do a strict cutoff, since that will give you the highest possible average. If you care more about getting the very best students, and are ok if you let in a few relative duds, you'll do better to lower your cutoff and select randomly from everyone who passed your cutoff. Elite colleges get their reputation from having students who go on to do great things, so I'd argue that at least for them, the "cutoff plus random selection" makes sense.
• drojas 6y ago
  This seems relevant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion The idea in the post looks very similar to an old Athenian system for elections. I think it'd be a great tool for fighting corruption and could produce good education opportunities with a lesser risk of institutional bias and other forms of problems related to human-based (s)election.
• bsder 6y ago
  Why does everybody think going to the Ivyies is such a good thing? I suspect they are now a net loss for all but the uppermost tier. If you want to do research as an undergrad, the big name schools are a detriment. They have plenty of good grad students. Pick a university outside the top 20 but still top 50 (still quite a good university) and be an amazing undergrad and you'll have professors fawning over you to do research for them. You'll have multiple publications and recommendations coming out the wazoo as you head into grad school. If you're a mediocre student at an Ivy, this isn't going to open that many doors as most people are better or better connected than you. Dubya didn't get where he was due to Yale; he got where he was because he was a Bush. I don't get this obsession with the Ivies unless you're on very particular tracks.
• eagsalazar2 6y ago
  ALL schools should pick randomly from all applicants. I mean, honestly, I don't feel as passionately about this for colleges, but private preschools or kindergartens that select kids based on anything is super f-ed up and kind of enrages me. The gradual defunding of public education in the US as more and more people move to elite districts or private school (white flight) is bad enough. Then excluding any kids who are slower learners, more hyperactive, who have less advantages at home (the kids who actually need great school the most) even if they have the $$ is borderline Nazi-party-bad it is so vile. Generally my take on this is: (1) all schools should select kids at random from applicants and (2) private schools should charge selected kids based on what those families can afford, up to their full tuition which in the Bay Area averages over $30K/year, (3) funding for every school should come from national or at least state level so travesties like Piedmont can't exist explicitly for the purpose of robbing poorer kids, 2 blocks away, from having decent schools (and parks, that's another subject). Anything else is hyper regressive toward children. F-that! (sorry to hijack the topic, but this is a subject I deal with a lot and royally pisses me off)
• starpilot 6y ago
  Don
• renewiltord 6y ago
  The whole point of going to top schools / universities is to be around other kids who have the drive, ambition, wherewithal, and societal advantages that you have. Then you get to benefit from the parochial altruism. Why would I go to a random uni when I can aim at the rich person uni?
• pontus 6y ago
  I think the points here are pretty interesting. Related to this, I feel like there's a missed opportunity for the federal government to create a national public online university. There's a lot of talk about online education being the future of education on the one hand and a lot of talk about "College For All" / cost of education / inclusivity on the other hand, but it seems like the people who care about the two things are disjoint. I used to teach physics, and every semester it was the same thing: confusion about the right-hand-rule, rotational motion, Gauss' law, ..., and every year I explained things the same way (and so did all the other teachers in the classrooms next door.) Why not record these lectures in some ridiculously high-end way, blowing $10M on that one course, make it epic, and then just be done with it? Imagine the amount of money that's spent every year teaching stuff over and over again... The federal government should allocate something like $1B-$5B toward building out a virtual course catalog and open it up for free to the public. I feel like it could fill the need of community colleges / public four-year institutions quite well. In fact, I could see community colleges basically transition into a set of distributed testing facilities where you go to take your final exams or something.
  • doktorhladnjak 6y ago
    When I took physics in community college, we joked that we were getting a Caltech education for $13 per credit hour because the instructor would just show videos of some famous physicist lecturing there.
• _Nat_ 6y ago
  This ISN'T a social-justice article. Picking the top applicants backfires because people game it. For example, consider Students A and B who're mostly identical except Student A likes to binge on Wikipedia while Student B spends every night doing SAT practice problems. Colleges that select only the top applicants get the B's of the world, who optimize their observables, while the A's seem somewhat less competitive on paper. If you change the rules -- like you start focusing on clubs, volunteering, or even just skipping the Top-1% -- the gamers'll adjust their strategies, out-performing the non-gamers who develop actual talents. The top colleges end up getting flooded by gamers who're focused on looking good. The pragmatic solution proposed in this article is to randomly select "good enough" applicants. This allows colleges to take in the top-performing non-gamers who have a wealth of actual skills (rather than gaming hacks) while also reducing the incentive for gamers to waste their time gaming the system.
  • DoreenMichele 6y ago
    FWIW, you've made me want to read the article (which may not happen, but thank you).
  • ffggvv 6y ago
    right but if you’re looking for people who will succeed in college (or the corporate world) wouldn’t you be looking for people who can achieve based on specified rules and fun to within a system, instead of undisciplined people who can’t do that but may naturally be intellectually curious? the first makes a terrific employee, the second might not put in hard work for stuffthey don’t find interesting or may leave altogether
    • _Nat_ 6y ago
      Depends on the job. If you've got a simple, mechanical job that a trained monkey could do if monkeys were more intelligent, then, definitely, you'd want folks who'll slavishly adhere to whatever task is assigned -- the folks who'll spend all night doing SAT prep problems would be perfect hires. But if you want to train innovators who'll actually advance their fields -- whether we're talking mathematicians, scientists, engineers, doctors, or business leaders -- then you'll want the folks who'll pursue such things on their own initiative along with the talents they've developed due to that intrinsic motivation. Elite non-innovators can have their place. In science/engineering/math, they won't be leaders, but they can still be effective researchers with strong publication records, reliably churning out decent-quality papers. In medicine, they can be great practicing doctors. In business, they'd be reliable middle-management types. Still, it'd be weird for a top institution to only have middle-management types.
• MarkMc 6y ago
  It's not mentioned in the article, but one benefit of this approach would be as an A/B test to see which group was more successful in life - the successful applicants or the rejects. This would allow the college to see exactly how much value they are providing.