9 ms·

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 t

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?
    - shajznnckfke 6y ago
      I feel like this policy would be too easy to hack - just find out which majors are only offered at UCB or UCLA or whatever school you want to go to.
      - a1369209993 6y ago
        Why are there any majors that are only offered at a single school? That seems like a much bigger problem than people being able to pick which school they want to go to.
        shajznnckfke 6y ago
        You could have a college major in any possible area of academic inquiry, which means the number of potential college majors is unlimited. Each school can only have so many faculty and they have to balance various factors when deciding who to hire. More resources dedicated to offering new majors might mean less resources going to popular majors that are overenrolled.
- coupdejarnac 6y ago
  Also, the colleges within UT can have much more stringent requirements. You're not getting into the engineering or business colleges with a mediocre background.
- huevosabio 6y ago
  It used to be the case (when I was in High School) that 10% meant ticket to UT Austin, in fact a huge fraction of students at UT Austin were 10% students. I found this policy excellent, it meant I had a bunch of colleagues from really small towns with no resources and this was clearly life changing for those attending college. It felt like everything college is supposed to be (even if imperfect).
  - tyingq 6y ago
    A lot do make it in, but some of the programs are limited in how many they can take. Which sucks, because some of the alternatives don't offer much of a campus experience...like UT Arlington.
tyingq 6y ago
"If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile." I was surprised at the amount of people that had aced the military ASVAB test when I showed up at basic training. Not that acing that is similar to acing the SAT, but it's not easy either. Some of them were signed up for pretty menial jobs too.
- dhosek 6y ago
  Really? I took the ASVAB when I was looking for ways to fund my college education and considered doing Army Reserve. The only question I had to pause on was one about manual transmissions (I'd never driven stick before and couldn't remember how the gears were numbered on my Schwinn). The recruiter claimed to be blown away by the fact that I scored so high on the test. I was never actually given my score. I wonder if those people claiming to have aced the ASVAB were bragging with nothing to back it up. Or alternately, that some recruiters routinely tell their recruits they aced the test to help seal the deal.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    They weren't claiming. Your scores are all posted on the wall in basic training. I walked the dorms and saw ~5 aces or very near aces out of maybe 200ish total people's scores. It's just somewhat odd because starting out as an E1 isn't terribly lucrative. It doesn't surprise me that 5 of 200 do that well. It surprises me that 5 of 200 that do so well actually enlist.
    - samatman 6y ago
      I'm curious how the Montgomery GI Bill changes that calculus. My distant understanding is that a not-insignificant number of people join the military because this will give them a full ride in college. They can't make much more than the Army pays with a high school diploma, and they can't afford college without either crippling debt or something like the GI Bill. But I don't have any facts here, just going off what an old friend told me about how he ended up in Iraq in the first place.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
emddudley 6y ago
> One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford private schools. I would assume this is the case for 95% of Americans. You must have had a different experience? My family was not wealthy so I did not get a choice whether to "play the game". Actually, I don't even know what game you are taking about.
- flowerlad 6y ago
  > You go to your local high school Parents are often willing to move to areas where there are good schools.
  - emddudley 6y ago
    Yes, but students don't make that choice. Parents do.
    - DiggyJohnson 6y ago
      You don't think parents make decisions based on what they believed to be in their child's best interest?
      - extralegos 6y ago
        If they can’t afford to, they don’t. Welcome to America. Most working people here simply don’t have this kind of flexibility.
        throwaway123x2 6y ago
        I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted... it's true. If you can't afford to move, you don't.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    In the top 10% of income brackets yes. Outside of it, not so much...
paconbork 6y ago
>getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools I think there's also a lot of value in giving the local students some peers that are more serious about education too. Ideally every school should offer a non-distracting environment for motivated students
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
Bad schools are made of bad policy, not bad kids.
- sukilot 6y ago
  And poor or uneducated parents.
buerkle 6y ago
UT Austin is allowed to accept only the top 6%. It also creates weird incentives for students. A friend of mine works in the front office of a local high school and she knows a lot of students who have dropped electives such as band because it lowers their grade point. In Austin area schools AP courses are weighted on a 6.0 scale which makes the problem worse if you want broaden your education and take non-weighted classes.
- atlgator 6y ago
  That is an incentive regardless of UT's policy. The top 10 are always fighting to be number 1 or 2 and weighted classes make all the difference.
  - tjroawuahdh 6y ago
    Yeah this is a serious defect in the high school system. Other than our valedictorian with an Eidadic memory got too marks in all classes, the rest of us who did band, a non honors course, all 4 years suffered from not getting a the weighted boost and ended up ranked a few places lower than our peers who got the same 1 or 2 Bs but took honors theatre or honors debate even if they actually liked band or track team better. The similar issue repeats itself in college where employers lkke McKinsey and Goldman prefilter for the 3.8+ gpa kids as a proxy for intellect/hard work. But this discourages the career minded students from going for the hardest classes with tough but intellectually stimulating professors and comes again down to who can figure out how to best cherry pick for easy grades.
    - DuskStar 6y ago
      On the other side of things... I went to a high school that didn't weight AP courses - Calc 2 counted the same as PE. There tended to be ~10 valedictorians out of a class of 300 - all with perfect GPAs.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      That's the reason I like having some classes as pass or fail. It really encourages students to take some classes that are out of their comfort zone and try something different. Else they'll stick to the optimal path and might miss out on some things they might have been good at.
majormajor 6y ago
> 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. In practice in Texas when I saw this the effect was very limited, because the best classes were largely full of the would-normally-be-in-other-schools magnet students, and didn't have a ton of uptake from the students in that school's regular geographic region. And then they gave bonus GPA points for taking those classes, so cracking the top 10% as a non-magnet-program student was harder still. Having the classes available was certainly helpful for a small number of students who took them who may not have had access to them otherwise, and concentrating the magnet programs let the district offer more a few more advanced classes than they might have otherwise, but it also somewhat negated any opportunity-spreading effects of the 10% rule.
seanmcdirmid 6y ago
> This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic. One of the common complaints higher performing students have is that they are dispersed in their classes and very bored as the teacher teaches to the lowest common denominator. Now, that is classrooms, not schools, but you have schools that try to accommodate gifted students in their own tracks and...why are they even bothering putting them in the same schools?
- dpeck 6y ago
  This is playing out at a massive scale with virtual learning. Large amounts of kids in the gifted program and generally “smart” kids have been pulled a week in. there is little value in keeping them together with kids below their academic level in this environment since all the social aspects are gone.
secondcoming 6y ago
> Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. Have you never been to school?
- d3nj4l 6y ago
  If you have a point you're driving at, it would've been better to state it than to ask a leading question.
aroundtown 6y ago
I think an interesting result of this has increased the snobbishness/elitism of UT Grads. Older UT Alums (prior to the 10% rule) are pretty chill people, but the newer ones are universally entitled jerks.
hakfoo 6y ago
Any "top nn%" rule asks for another form of toxic gaming of the system. At least back around the turn of the century, in Arizona, the state universities gave a full tuition waiver for the top 25 or 33% of the graduating class. (Not sure if they still do) This seems at its face to be a very inclusive goal-- you'd make the program accessible to students regardless of finances. But some schools were so aggressive on the AP and other 'weighted' programmes (A=5.0, B=4.0, etc.), that the valedictorian would have something like a 4.6 GPA, and even a standard 4.0 might not clear the top 25%. It would not be enough just to be an excellent student, you had to explicitly load up on weighted courses-- and of course, there were no weighted fine arts or vocational courses. This leads to a bunch of toxic outcomes. A straight A student would rank below someone with an A/B record, because she chose the right courses to take. There was pressure to choose the courses which bumped the GPA as opposed to the ones which fit interests or potential commercial utility, which I suspect would lead to resource starvation and classes cancelled due to undersubscription.
- sukilot 6y ago
  That's not a problem with the admission system, that's a problem with the scholarship being underfunded. If 33% is missing people, go to 50%. This idea that college admissions should be competitive is absolutely toxic
dehrmann 6y ago
I don't know the answer, and this isn't a leading question, but you left out the interesting bit: what are the predictors of success in college?
jollofricepeas 6y ago
Isn’t the United States still heavily segregated??? Take a look at the data on Milwaukee, Detroit and Chicago for example. As Clarence Thomas has mentioned often “affirmative action” just covers up larger injustices like underfunded public schools and housing discrimination. In a lot of states, we have Democratic big cities and Republican towns with a Republican state legislature. Guess which areas in the state get the most funding for their schools —- it’s NOT the cities with the most people per square mile. READ: - https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/07/20/detroit-chicago-memphis-most-segregated-cities-america-housing-policy/39703787/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/07/20/detroit-chic... - https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/08/milwaukee-most-segregated-area-country-brookings-says/2512258002/ https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/... - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/clarence-thomass-radical-vision-of-race https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/clarence-thomass-rad...
jonnypotty 6y ago
You think getting good students to go to crappy schools is a way to improve those schools? I'd say you don't know anything about schools then. And you think randomly selecting students instead of selecting them on the basis of merit is a way to find gems? This is all such wishful thinking without any evidence or even, I have to say, common sense.
- Randomini 6y ago
  If you're refuting based on lack of evidence, I'm interested in counter-evidence, beyond the anecdotal.
  - jonnypotty 6y ago
    I'm not refuting anything! What I'm saying is if you claim to know how to change and improve education you better have some evidence to support your claim. As to why I feel like I can comment..my father has been an education consultant for the past 30 years, before that he was a teacher, my sister is a teacher and so was my mum. What you're espousing is an ideological approach that you'd like to be true. Why not claim its true, I mean, you're smart right, why would you need evidence to backup what you're saying?
- coldtea 6y ago
  >You think getting good students to go to crappy schools is a way to improve those schools? I'd say you don't know anything about schools then. You'd say that, but it would be wrong. >And you think randomly selecting students instead of selecting them on the basis of merit is a way to find gems Totally. Especially since there's little about "merit" in the current system.
  - jonnypotty 6y ago
    So, as outcomes for kids are hugely affected by the school they go to, you'd like to take kids OUT of schools where they're expected to do really well and put them into schools where they probably are not going to, in the hope they slightly improve grades for other students. I'm sorry, but I really don't think you've thought this through.

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?
  - shajznnckfke 6y ago
    I feel like this policy would be too easy to hack - just find out which majors are only offered at UCB or UCLA or whatever school you want to go to.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      Why are there any majors that are only offered at a single school? That seems like a much bigger problem than people being able to pick which school they want to go to.
      - shajznnckfke 6y ago
        You could have a college major in any possible area of academic inquiry, which means the number of potential college majors is unlimited. Each school can only have so many faculty and they have to balance various factors when deciding who to hire. More resources dedicated to offering new majors might mean less resources going to popular majors that are overenrolled.
coupdejarnac 6y ago
Also, the colleges within UT can have much more stringent requirements. You're not getting into the engineering or business colleges with a mediocre background.
huevosabio 6y ago
It used to be the case (when I was in High School) that 10% meant ticket to UT Austin, in fact a huge fraction of students at UT Austin were 10% students. I found this policy excellent, it meant I had a bunch of colleagues from really small towns with no resources and this was clearly life changing for those attending college. It felt like everything college is supposed to be (even if imperfect).
- tyingq 6y ago
  A lot do make it in, but some of the programs are limited in how many they can take. Which sucks, because some of the alternatives don't offer much of a campus experience...like UT Arlington.

tyingq 6y ago

"If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile." I was surprised at the amount of people that had aced the military ASVAB test when I showed up at basic training. Not that acing that is similar to acing the SAT, but it's not easy either. Some of them were signed up for pretty menial jobs too.

dhosek 6y ago
Really? I took the ASVAB when I was looking for ways to fund my college education and considered doing Army Reserve. The only question I had to pause on was one about manual transmissions (I'd never driven stick before and couldn't remember how the gears were numbered on my Schwinn). The recruiter claimed to be blown away by the fact that I scored so high on the test. I was never actually given my score. I wonder if those people claiming to have aced the ASVAB were bragging with nothing to back it up. Or alternately, that some recruiters routinely tell their recruits they aced the test to help seal the deal.
- tyingq 6y ago
  They weren't claiming. Your scores are all posted on the wall in basic training. I walked the dorms and saw ~5 aces or very near aces out of maybe 200ish total people's scores. It's just somewhat odd because starting out as an E1 isn't terribly lucrative. It doesn't surprise me that 5 of 200 do that well. It surprises me that 5 of 200 that do so well actually enlist.
  - samatman 6y ago
    I'm curious how the Montgomery GI Bill changes that calculus. My distant understanding is that a not-insignificant number of people join the military because this will give them a full ride in college. They can't make much more than the Army pays with a high school diploma, and they can't afford college without either crippling debt or something like the GI Bill. But I don't have any facts here, just going off what an old friend told me about how he ended up in Iraq in the first place.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

emddudley 6y ago

> One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford private schools. I would assume this is the case for 95% of Americans. You must have had a different experience? My family was not wealthy so I did not get a choice whether to "play the game". Actually, I don't even know what game you are taking about.

flowerlad 6y ago
> You go to your local high school Parents are often willing to move to areas where there are good schools.
- emddudley 6y ago
  Yes, but students don't make that choice. Parents do.
  - DiggyJohnson 6y ago
    You don't think parents make decisions based on what they believed to be in their child's best interest?
    - extralegos 6y ago
      If they can’t afford to, they don’t. Welcome to America. Most working people here simply don’t have this kind of flexibility.
      - throwaway123x2 6y ago
        I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted... it's true. If you can't afford to move, you don't.
- coldtea 6y ago
  In the top 10% of income brackets yes. Outside of it, not so much...

paconbork 6y ago

>getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools I think there's also a lot of value in giving the local students some peers that are more serious about education too. Ideally every school should offer a non-distracting environment for motivated students

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

Bad schools are made of bad policy, not bad kids.

sukilot 6y ago
And poor or uneducated parents.

buerkle 6y ago

UT Austin is allowed to accept only the top 6%. It also creates weird incentives for students. A friend of mine works in the front office of a local high school and she knows a lot of students who have dropped electives such as band because it lowers their grade point. In Austin area schools AP courses are weighted on a 6.0 scale which makes the problem worse if you want broaden your education and take non-weighted classes.

atlgator 6y ago
That is an incentive regardless of UT's policy. The top 10 are always fighting to be number 1 or 2 and weighted classes make all the difference.
- tjroawuahdh 6y ago
  Yeah this is a serious defect in the high school system. Other than our valedictorian with an Eidadic memory got too marks in all classes, the rest of us who did band, a non honors course, all 4 years suffered from not getting a the weighted boost and ended up ranked a few places lower than our peers who got the same 1 or 2 Bs but took honors theatre or honors debate even if they actually liked band or track team better. The similar issue repeats itself in college where employers lkke McKinsey and Goldman prefilter for the 3.8+ gpa kids as a proxy for intellect/hard work. But this discourages the career minded students from going for the hardest classes with tough but intellectually stimulating professors and comes again down to who can figure out how to best cherry pick for easy grades.
  - DuskStar 6y ago
    On the other side of things... I went to a high school that didn't weight AP courses - Calc 2 counted the same as PE. There tended to be ~10 valedictorians out of a class of 300 - all with perfect GPAs.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    That's the reason I like having some classes as pass or fail. It really encourages students to take some classes that are out of their comfort zone and try something different. Else they'll stick to the optimal path and might miss out on some things they might have been good at.

majormajor 6y ago

> 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. In practice in Texas when I saw this the effect was very limited, because the best classes were largely full of the would-normally-be-in-other-schools magnet students, and didn't have a ton of uptake from the students in that school's regular geographic region. And then they gave bonus GPA points for taking those classes, so cracking the top 10% as a non-magnet-program student was harder still. Having the classes available was certainly helpful for a small number of students who took them who may not have had access to them otherwise, and concentrating the magnet programs let the district offer more a few more advanced classes than they might have otherwise, but it also somewhat negated any opportunity-spreading effects of the 10% rule.

seanmcdirmid 6y ago

> This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic. One of the common complaints higher performing students have is that they are dispersed in their classes and very bored as the teacher teaches to the lowest common denominator. Now, that is classrooms, not schools, but you have schools that try to accommodate gifted students in their own tracks and...why are they even bothering putting them in the same schools?

dpeck 6y ago
This is playing out at a massive scale with virtual learning. Large amounts of kids in the gifted program and generally “smart” kids have been pulled a week in. there is little value in keeping them together with kids below their academic level in this environment since all the social aspects are gone.

secondcoming 6y ago

> Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. Have you never been to school?

d3nj4l 6y ago
If you have a point you're driving at, it would've been better to state it than to ask a leading question.

aroundtown 6y ago

I think an interesting result of this has increased the snobbishness/elitism of UT Grads. Older UT Alums (prior to the 10% rule) are pretty chill people, but the newer ones are universally entitled jerks.

hakfoo 6y ago

Any "top nn%" rule asks for another form of toxic gaming of the system. At least back around the turn of the century, in Arizona, the state universities gave a full tuition waiver for the top 25 or 33% of the graduating class. (Not sure if they still do) This seems at its face to be a very inclusive goal-- you'd make the program accessible to students regardless of finances. But some schools were so aggressive on the AP and other 'weighted' programmes (A=5.0, B=4.0, etc.), that the valedictorian would have something like a 4.6 GPA, and even a standard 4.0 might not clear the top 25%. It would not be enough just to be an excellent student, you had to explicitly load up on weighted courses-- and of course, there were no weighted fine arts or vocational courses. This leads to a bunch of toxic outcomes. A straight A student would rank below someone with an A/B record, because she chose the right courses to take. There was pressure to choose the courses which bumped the GPA as opposed to the ones which fit interests or potential commercial utility, which I suspect would lead to resource starvation and classes cancelled due to undersubscription.

sukilot 6y ago
That's not a problem with the admission system, that's a problem with the scholarship being underfunded. If 33% is missing people, go to 50%. This idea that college admissions should be competitive is absolutely toxic

dehrmann 6y ago

I don't know the answer, and this isn't a leading question, but you left out the interesting bit: what are the predictors of success in college?

jollofricepeas 6y ago

Isn’t the United States still heavily segregated??? Take a look at the data on Milwaukee, Detroit and Chicago for example. As Clarence Thomas has mentioned often “affirmative action” just covers up larger injustices like underfunded public schools and housing discrimination. In a lot of states, we have Democratic big cities and Republican towns with a Republican state legislature. Guess which areas in the state get the most funding for their schools —- it’s NOT the cities with the most people per square mile. READ: - https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/07/20/detroit-chicago-memphis-most-segregated-cities-america-housing-policy/39703787/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/07/20/detroit-chic... - https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/08/milwaukee-most-segregated-area-country-brookings-says/2512258002/ https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/milwaukee/2019/01/... - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/clarence-thomass-radical-vision-of-race https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/clarence-thomass-rad...

jonnypotty 6y ago

You think getting good students to go to crappy schools is a way to improve those schools? I'd say you don't know anything about schools then. And you think randomly selecting students instead of selecting them on the basis of merit is a way to find gems? This is all such wishful thinking without any evidence or even, I have to say, common sense.

Randomini 6y ago
If you're refuting based on lack of evidence, I'm interested in counter-evidence, beyond the anecdotal.
- jonnypotty 6y ago
  I'm not refuting anything! What I'm saying is if you claim to know how to change and improve education you better have some evidence to support your claim. As to why I feel like I can comment..my father has been an education consultant for the past 30 years, before that he was a teacher, my sister is a teacher and so was my mum. What you're espousing is an ideological approach that you'd like to be true. Why not claim its true, I mean, you're smart right, why would you need evidence to backup what you're saying?
coldtea 6y ago
>You think getting good students to go to crappy schools is a way to improve those schools? I'd say you don't know anything about schools then. You'd say that, but it would be wrong. >And you think randomly selecting students instead of selecting them on the basis of merit is a way to find gems Totally. Especially since there's little about "merit" in the current system.
- jonnypotty 6y ago
  So, as outcomes for kids are hugely affected by the school they go to, you'd like to take kids OUT of schools where they're expected to do really well and put them into schools where they probably are not going to, in the hope they slightly improve grades for other students. I'm sorry, but I really don't think you've thought this through.