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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

by 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.

by kokooo 6y ago

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.