10 ms·

The Tyranny of Merit

96 points by mcguire 6y ago

pontus 6y ago
I would say that the exception is grad school which is much more meritocratic than undergraduate admissions.
- aurizon 6y ago
  Yes, the profs do not want deadheads doing their research...
  - pontus 6y ago
    More so because grad students receive grants that cover their tuition and some basic salary. In other words, unlike undergraduate students, graduate students actually costs money.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      Are you sure you’re thinking of master’s students and not PhDs?
    - vector_spaces 6y ago
      Not all grad students get a salary. In particular older grad students who support other people and can't afford to live on a grad student stipend (which is a starvation wage for one, let alone more) and therefore must work a job while in grad school do not get any stipend, they pay their way. Which is of course a much easier arrangement for the student to manage if they have a trust fund or wealthy family to dip into (speaking to the article at hand)
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      "More so because grad students receive grants that cover their tuition and some basic salary." That only tends to be true for PHD programs where the student is expected to work on research that actually brings in grant money. That's not true for all grad programs. Some are not research-focused at all, and for those the student usually has to pay their own way or get other forms of financial aid (which not all students qualify for). Even if they do qualify for financial aid, they might not get any, if the limited amount that is available has already been given out to other qualified students.
- forrestthewoods 6y ago
  The abuse of grad and PhD students might be even more egregious than undergrad admissions. Paying objectively world class talent a meager $15,000 stipend to work themselves to the bone while they earn the university millions in grants and industry contracts, teach undergrad classes, and slave away on their own thesis. It’s super gross.
  - manishsharan 6y ago
    Well .. there is an upside to this. Typically grad students who are employed by the university as RA or TA don't have to pay tuition . About 18 months of misery that opens up a world of opportunities.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      Highly dependent on the field nowadays IMO. A lot of masters programs exist as a way to make it easier to get a US visa.
    - forrestthewoods 6y ago
      18 months of misery for a Master ~7 years of misery for a PhD
  - ksk 6y ago
    Please propose a solution too!
    - forrestthewoods 6y ago
      I work with many PhDs so I’m familiar with the problems. But I don’t know enough to have a solution. It may just be “pay them a living wage!”. Pay them $75,000 and call it a day. The waived tuition cost is BS. They aren’t undergrads living on campus and taking a half dozen classes. It doesn’t cost $50,000 / year to have a PhD student do lots of work for the school. Quite the opposite! The school makes a lot of money of their labor!! At least for STEM PhDs at research universities.
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
  I've heard that, but at the same time the people that go to top grad schools are also overwhelmingly people from top undergrads, likely because of professor relationships. I've talked to several people about my profile for grad school and the consensus is it's not good enough given my undergrad stature. I've talked to folks from schools like CMU and UIUC who got into elite grad schools without papers or ~3.9+ GPAs, but I'm already out of the running with these things with a degree from NC State. It's incredibly depressing to know I'm already shut out of most forms of social mobility at 24!
  - mattgreenrocks 6y ago
    I’m not sure I buy this. If you’re wanting to go to grad school, go to grad school. Maybe you don’t go to an Ivy, but if you’re after the grad school experience then an Ivy is a nice potential bonus, not a necessary thing.
    - akhilcacharya 6y ago
      The opportunity cost of ~$150k a year x2-6 years doesn't work out unless it's an "impressive' name. NC State + Northeastern, for instance, on a resume doesn't engender respect even if they're both fine institutions on their own. NC State + MIT for instance does, but according to the several MIT profs I've talked to my resume straight up does not and will not cut it, so I'm sort of unimpressive for life as it seems.
aurizon 6y ago
Does the car(family) have the gas($$) for the entire trip? All that is needed is a gas gage...
_qulr 6y ago
I was accepted to Cornell as an undergrad, but my family couldn't afford it, so I had to go to a state university instead, with in-state tuition. My scores didn't even matter without the money.
- glial 6y ago
  Same here, but Reed and University of Chicago.
- awat 6y ago
  I wonder how common this story is, my brother was accepted to Penn but our family didn’t have the money. We both ended up at large state schools getting honors degrees. The whole decision making process for us was money based not merit based.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    My high school friend was accepted to MIT, couldn't afford it, and also went to a state university. So that's 3!
    - fakedang 6y ago
      Got accepted at Berkeley, didn't get a scholarship that I needed, ended up studying in India instead. To be fair, you can always go to MIT or any top notch university for a graduate/second undergrad degree, but you can only go to IIT/NIT once.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      Usually big-name schools have high price tags but extremely generous financial aid. MIT: > Six out of every 10 students receive MIT need-based aid. the average price paid by an undergraduate receiving financial aid in 2019–2020 was $21,917—that’s approximately what it costs to attend a state school. And for students with family incomes under $90,000 a year, we ensure that scholarship funding will allow them to attend MIT tuition-free. Harvard puts the following numbers front and center: 20 % of Harvard families pay nothing 55 % receive Harvard scholarship aid 12 K average parent contribution 100 % of students can graduate debt-free Other schools in this tier have similar policies.
ppod 6y ago
>First, the SAT, it turns out, does not measure scholarly aptitude or native intelligence independent of social and educational background. To the contrary, SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth. Why start the article off with an obvious falsehood? The fact that SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth does not mean that none of the variation in scores is explained by aptitude. When people make the argument in this article they never seem to propose a fairer alternative. I'm suspicious that the criticism of SATs is actually a movement towards returning to patronage and nepotism.
- devdas 6y ago
  The claim is that parental wealth influences SAT scores more than intelligence.
  - sova 6y ago
    Is that somehow related to being able to afford all the prep courses that are specifically for getting a high score on <insert standardized test acronym here>?
    - ec109685 6y ago
      That and attending better schools growing up.
    - applecrazy 6y ago
      I think this is largely false, and I took the SAT about 3 years ago. My only prep was a $25 book and some free official practice tests. Managed to get a 95th percentile score on my second try. My family could have afforded prep courses, but I wanted to prove to myself that it could be done for much less (which it was).
  - jdminhbg 6y ago
    It's the claim, but it's not substantiated, it's just asserted.
grenoire 6y ago
The higher education situation in the US is quite depressing on quite a few angles, the (second?) biggest being the implicit income requirements for the crème de la crème. Any HN takes on how or if this can be addressed?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- treis 6y ago
  I don't think it's really true anymore. Pretty much all the elite schools charge tuition on a sliding scale based on family income. No one that gets admitted to Yale "can't" afford it. With can't in quotations because the systems not perfect, but for the most part money is not going to stop you.
  - grenoire 6y ago
    That's good to hear, I had heard that this is not true for all Ivy, and especially not for other high-tier ones without significantly big endowments or merit scholarship funds though. Just wanted to check up on what the opinion here was.
    - hydroxideOH- 6y ago
      Need-blind admissions only exists for a very small fraction of schools -- those that are in maybe the top 20? (I don't know the exact number). Also, it often leaves out middle class students, whose parents make too much to get substantial amount of aid, but don't make enough to pay the tuition out right without being buried in loans. Because of this, high achieving, middle class students often go to state schools, which often give merit scholarships (top-20 schools don't), and have much lower tuition.
    - an_opabinia 6y ago
      Every Gen X person I know who took out loans for professional school at top tier universities is richer than even people who were in technology in the early 2000s. They’re the ones who bought houses in all the gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re the ones with two or more kids, and they bought index funds with all that money, so the effects of going to a top tier university massively compounded. Some people have already pointed out that top tier universities have been discounted for the last decade. But even in 2000, Harvard college cost less than half of what it does now. Taking out loans to pay for Havard in 2000 would be the best investment you could ever make in your life, just considering that same inflation that partly raised Harvard’s tuition price also reduced the real cost of your debt. I believe the underlying problem is not financial literacy though.
forrestthewoods 6y ago
Meh. Article headline depends on your definition of “elite”. Admissions to the top 5 schools are broken. There’s more qualified students than there are slots. The only solution to that is more slots. If you get a 1500 on your SAT that’s a free ride to almost any university in the country. Especially if you come from an under-represented background. This includes Ivy League schools. But not Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT. The best ticket to a top 25 world class education is a high SAT score. It’s a free ticket available to anyone. I have many complaints about our university. But even a mediocre test score gets you a free ride to very very good state schools. Articles like this only reinforce the false necessity of Top 5 or Top 10 status.
- sthnblllII 6y ago
  If the students at these schools aren't any better than those at dozens of others high ranking schools, why are so many executives, judges and politicians graduates from these few school?
  - watwut 6y ago
    Network effect and credentials. It does not matter who is objectively better if quality is similar. It matters what people assume when confronted with uncertainity.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    Different strokes for different folks, but if a school has a a lot of executives, judges and politicians graduate from them, that's a reason for me to avoid that school like the plague.
- LukeShu 6y ago
  > If you get a 1500 on your SAT A bit OT, but: I was going to say that the 1600 point scale hasn't been used for years (since 2005, when they switched to a 2400 point scale), but it turns out that they went back to the 1600 point scale in 2016.
  - 6y ago
gnicholas 6y ago
Does the article say anything that substantiates the headline? I was expecting evidence of causality but didn’t see any when I skimmed through it. Did I miss it?
- fakedang 6y ago
  It's an Indian outlet, so it's likely targeting prospective Indian students and informing them beforehand.
  - ec109685 6y ago
    It’s an excerpt from this book: The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374289980/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc_meRUFbR2XVC8B https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374289980/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc...
    - ec109685 6y ago
      Agree the SATs aren’t a great measure. I got a 1430 on the older version of them and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to spell Tyranny! It measures a very certain subset of skills.
- mcguire 6y ago
  It's an excerpt from the author's book.
bigpumpkin 6y ago
High family income matters for college admissions not because it causes a higher SAT score. People could study for the SAT regardless of income. It matters when elite admissions favor legacy students, athletes, and those with unique extracurricular activities. All of which favor the rich.
JamesBarney 6y ago
> First, the SAT, it turns out, does not measure scholarly aptitude or native intelligence independent of social and educational background Wouldn't this mean if you compared two groups of kids from the same income quintile one with a very low SAT score and one with a very high one they'd have the exact same life outcomes? I find this hard to believe. Also this study disagrees that coaching has much of an impact on SAT scores. https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2pva2jus90c1el/2012-montgomery.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2pva2jus90c1el/2012-montgomery.pd...
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Not necessarily. There are an infinite number of characteristics other than those listed that might affect both SAT outcome and life outcome among those groups...
- ardit33 6y ago
  I think two poor kids, raised on the same neighborhood/conditions, measured with each other, SAT will give you a proxy for academic ability/IQ. Two wealthy kids, raised on the same neighborhood/conditions, measured with each other, SAT will give you a proxy for academic ability/IQ. That comparison might break down when measuring A poor kid, with a wealthy kid. Or a ESL student (english as foreign language, to a native speaker). The wealthy kids, probably went to better schools, had taken PRE-SATS since 8th grade, has tutor, and everything in between to get better. Poor kids are probably sharing a room with their parents, live in crappy conditions, and have to start working as teens to help out the family economically... All upper middle class folks know this: the more testing practice you do, the better you become at that test... SAT and IQ tests are a valid tool of measurement when two people have had the same conditions and training. Let me translate into engineering terms: Two engineers go to interview, one is good and has some great experience, the other one is average, but just LEETCODES for months before the interview. The average engineer gets the job, while the better one might not, as he probably didn't solve some Leetcode style of problem fast enough. Im real life scenarios, the good engineer would have outperformed the average one.
  - mercutio2 6y ago
yandie 6y ago
I feel that the overall university admission process is broken. No matter how we evaluate people, we are prone to biases, and things like diversity and affirmative actions (whether you disagree with it or not) add another layer of complexity to the process. I like the idea from the powerball revolution epsiode of Revisionist History (http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revolution http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revo...). Why not have some filter to get the top students in to a pool, then randomly select them? I mean there are more qualified students than there are slots, so it's only "fair" if each of them get the same chance. No politics - just a pure number game at that point. You can argue the filter could create a disadvantage to poor students etc..., but you can adjust that in ways that the initial pool of potential applicants will be even. Of course when I mention the concept of randomly selecting a candidate, it makes people real uncomfortable :)
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Well, no school wants to have selected some of the best, they want to select the best.
  - yandie 6y ago
    What does "the best" really mean? At the end of the day I assume they want to optimize for future success. In that case we humans have been proven to be not very good at that in many other areas. And why can't you select a the best students and then randomly select among them? I don't believe that a 3.8 student will certainly perform worse than a 3.85 student, for example.
- RestlessMind 6y ago
  > I feel that the overall university admission process is broken. I agree and think the brokenness is in the limited number of opportunities. Why are Harvard and other Ivies the only ones that matter on your resume? Once a society limits the number of opportunities to reach the upper echelons, it is bound to set off scramble among all the parents, since everyone wants the best for their children. For some reasons, this is not only an American thing. I believe elite institutions in other countries as equally (or even more) selective.
rayiner 6y ago
> Second, the system of meritocratic admission that Conant promoted did not lead to the classless society he hoped it would produce. Inequalities of income and wealth have deepened since the 1940s and 1950s, and the social mobility that Conant saw as the remedy for a stratified society has not come about. The haves and have-nots have not been trading places from one generation to the next. This is demonstrably untrue. First, the article’s use of a family making $200,000 is telling. If you look around that people who are billionaires today, most did come from upper middle class families, but not necessarily wealthy ones. Mark Zuckerberg’s parents are a psychiatrist and a dentist. Opening wide the class of the most elite to the children of upper middle class professionals is in fact a huge societal achievement. Few societies have that kind of mobility. Another example is the economic mobility of Asians raised in the bottom 20% of income. These people lack both financial resources and social connections. But they have a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income as adults. Test-based meritocracy like the SAT is a huge enabler of that.
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
  > Opening wide the class of the most elite to the children of upper middle class professionals is in fact a huge societal achievement. Few societies have that kind of mobility. I have trouble agreeing with that, especially given the tendencies of pulling up the ladder. The billionaires are basically irrelevant because they're too small in number, the upper middle class and everyone else is the chasm that is widening by the day [0]. It's absolutely becoming or has become a stratified structure. [0] https://www.brookings.edu/book/dream-hoarders/ https://www.brookings.edu/book/dream-hoarders/
calibas 6y ago
I don't know how the industry could claim the SAT isn't coachable without knowing full well they were lying. The parents, teachers, and students knew when I was in high school 20 years ago, yet it was a secret to the industry? These people are the gatekeepers to a higher education, they should be held to higher standards.
- rayiner 6y ago
  The SAT isn’t really coachable for most people: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124278685697537839 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124278685697537839 > The college counselors' report concludes that, on average, prep courses yield only a modest benefit, "contrary to the claims made by many test-preparation providers." It found that SAT coaching resulted in about 30 points in score improvement on the SAT, out of a possible 1600, and less than one point out of a possible 36 on the ACT, the other main college-entrance exam, says Derek Briggs, chairman of the research and methodology department at the University of Colorado in Boulder and author of the admissions counselors' report. https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the... > Once scholars control for all these factors as best they can, they find that coaching has a positive but small effect: Perhaps 10 or 20 points in total on the SAT, mostly on the math section, according to careful work by Derek Briggs of the University of Colorado Boulder and Ben Domingue of Stanford University. > Some estimates run a little higher: A 2010 study led by Ohio State’s Claudia Buchmann and based on the National Education Longitudinal Study found that the use of books, videos, and computer software offers no boost whatsoever, while a private test prep course adds 30 points to your score on average, and the use of a private tutor adds 37.
  - an_opabinia 6y ago
    The exam is totally coachable, you just have to do cram school. Those studies look at private tutoring which spends possibly 1/20th of the time kids spend in cram school. Cram school is often conflated with private tutoring but they are completely different things.
    - 6y ago
RestlessMind 6y ago
> As we have seen, relatively few children of the poor rise to affluence, and relatively few children of affluence fall below the ranks of the upper-middle class. Notwithstanding the American dream of rising from rags to riches, upward mobility is less common in the United States than in many European countries, and there is no evidence of improvement in recent decades. This I believe is the crux of the problem in how the "upward mobility" is measured. If it is strictly by income/wealth quintiles, then it is strictly zero-sum. But is the world really a zero-sum game? I'd content that 80-90% people in USA / Western Europe have a far superior quality of life than the top-1% of the past on many metrics like health, nutrition or peace. So one can say that their entire societies were upwardly mobile from 1946 onward.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > relatively few children of affluence fall below the ranks of the upper-middle class Everyone talks about upward mobility, but we rarely talk about downward mobility. It's not impossible to go from "rags to riches", but who ever goes from riches to rags? It's not a true "meritocracy" unless the system reliably impoverishes the idiot children of the wealthy, but that almost never happens. The wealthy are protected, regardless of merit, and they take up space at or near the top of the system, reducing the number of positions open to more qualified candidates.
  - RestlessMind 6y ago
    > unless the system reliably impoverishes the idiot children of the wealthy While I agree that the idiot children of the wealthy should not get to wield any significant influence on the society, "impoverishing them" doesn't seem like the right goal, since that might provoke a reaction from their wealthy parents who are driven, connected and talented. Rather, such idiots should be managed out on a safe landing, where they don't influence society at all but their parents are still not worried about their future.
    - _qulr 6y ago
      > "impoverishing them" doesn't seem like the right goal I don't think anyone should be impoverished, and indeed I'm not a supporter of the idea of "meritocracy", but I think it's fair to take the arguments for it to their logical and abhorrent conclusion. After all, the supporters seem perfectly content to allow the non-wealthy (and assumed non-meritorious) to become impoverished.
ausjke 6y ago
statistically speaking, most high-income family implies parents with more self-discipline, better hard-working attitude, and normally they spend a lot more time with their kids' growth,etc. in this fancy socialism-is-the-future era, our system now punishes "the evil rich" to make sure we are all going to have 'equity-result', as said the 'road-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intention', guess what, those true 'bad' rich family always knows how to circumvent any rules that is targeting them, in the end it's always the honest hard-working high-income family got punished. saying rich-family is key to elite university, is the same as saying exercise-person lives longer, the 'rich' or 'exercise' are nothing to blame most of the time. "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries" this kind of report is absolutely trash.
- ec109685 6y ago
  Sorry, how are rich people being punished in this straw man vision of reality of yours? I came from a well off family (who were on food stamps when I was first born — socialism FTW), and had tons of advantages while I meandered through college before eventually graduating. I was not overly disciplined but had many extra chances someone from less means would not have.
  - ausjke 6y ago
    food stamp is fine unless it's abused, it's designed to level the play field, the so-called 'equal opportunity'. poor family already got helped there. some made it by this help, many did not. so the trend now becomes 'equity result', which will make nobody wants to work hard anymore, that's socialism at its worst. this is also called mob to the hard working "rich" families. US is moving to that direction, fast. by the way, I was from a poor family, and now barely made it. I would rather keep working my way up instead of seeing socialism-for-equity-result here. I also hope for those who depends on food-stamp and now is in good shape, donating to the community, and always be thankful to other taxpayers who gave you and your family a hand, money is not from air, it's from other working persons' pocket.
    - 6y ago
mensetmanusman 6y ago
It’s not a surprise that the Ivy league exists to educate the children of the wealthy. What is a surprise is that the Ivy leagues and the wealthy are ashamed to admit this. I think people wouldn’t get all worked up about this if people would be more honest. Yes, there will always be some income differences, yes, some people self fragment into groups by race, class, interests, etc. when given a choice. What you see are natural consequences of people’s decisions.
- smallnamespace 6y ago
  Elite institutions want to admit who they think will be the future elite, because they will be writing the alumni checks, serving as trustees, and providing a prestigious halo around the institution. As someone who attended an Ivy, it is simply untrue that it's mostly blue-blood old money hobnobbing around. First, there's not enough of them to fill the classes every year. Second, wealthy people themselves want their children to be educated with other smart kids.
  - pc86 6y ago
    I don't think the argument is that most of the people at Ivies are blue blood WASPs. I think the argument is that if you happen to be a blue blood WASP you are disproportionately likely to get in regardless (or in spite of, in the case of legacies and donors) your merit.
    - xhkkffbf 6y ago
      This is almost certainly not the case any more. It was at one time, but it isn't. Princeton's recent incoming class was more than 60% what they called "persons of color", a term that included all Asians. Among the people who might be called whites, Jews were easily 20-30%. If you start to filter out Catholics, there just aren't that many WASPs at these places anymore. For extra credit, go look up how many WASPs are on the Supreme Court. How many years has it been this way? The stereotypes just don't fit and haven't for some time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
csa 6y ago
A few comments on this book excerpt: - For the most part, high SATs are tables stakes for applying to elite schools, they are not the deciding factor. The exceptions are for athletes and other folks with preferred admissions. I don’t know why people continue to think that great grades and high SAT scores are the main or only factors in elite school admissions — the admissions materials themselves make it abundantly clear that they are looking for more. - All that said, the “more” mentioned above is typically easier to access if you come from a high income family. - The excerpt mentions low % of students who go from bottom quintile to top quintile after an elite education (~2%). Is that 2% of the total student body or 2% of the bottom quintile elite school students? This is unclear to me, but if it’s the former, that’s probably a big win since lowest quintile students are a small part of the student body to begin with. - Note that some (many?) jumps from bottom quintile to top quintile may just be a well-off family that ran into bad times. This happened to a friend of mine — wealthy family one generation, the next generation lost it to drugs and alcohol, and the third generation reverted back to wealthy. - The leap from the bottom quintile to the top typically requires much more than education. There are a ton of soft skills that are common in the top quintile that are foreign or antithetical to people from the bottom quintile —- general communication, conflict resolution, attitudes towards money, socializing skills, etc. Without these skills, it’s really tough to make it to the top quintile unless you effectively hit the time-in-history and degree lottery with a FAANG-type of high paying job. Even then, someone from the bottom quintile will have limited upside without the soft skills mentioned above. - To close, I wish people would stop presenting elite schools as the gateway to riches or even a stable high income. Learning how to play the “game” that the top quintile plays is much more important than where someone went to school. Obviously schooling (esp. elite schooling) is part of that game, but based on the wide variety of winners in the game that I have known, the soft skills I have mentioned are a much more common and salient trait than an elite schooling.
- djg321 6y ago
  This got me thinking: how can someone who didn't grow up with the relevant soft skills learn them later in life? Are there any specific books or places to role play these soft skills that are recommended?
hnracer 6y ago
The first sentence seems factually incorrect or at least appears to be a bare assertion without basis. "SAT ... does not measure ... native intelligence independent of social or educational background." Studies have found an extremely high correlation between SAT and g-factor. Is this correlation completely due to social and educational factors? That's quite a strong claim and I would need to see some compelling evidence for it. The correlation between SAT and wealth is not surprising. Wealth and g-factor are also correlated. In addition, g-factor of parents is extremely highly correlated to that of their kids through both genetics and upbringing. That there exists a transitive correlation between all of parental wealth, child-g, parental-g, and child-SAT is totally expected from our understanding of intelligence in the literature. Wealth as a driver independent of g needs to be explicitly tested for in a multivariable model (has this been done?).
k__ 6y ago
"SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth" Isn't this kinda obvious? I mean, if you have parents that can teach you stuff or pay someone to teach you additionally to the stuff you learn at school you'll always fare better. I don't think there can be a way to measure any kind of aptitude independently from your upbringing. We don't need better tests, we need to help parents to raise better children.
- haihaibye 6y ago
  Yes it's obvious if 3 things are true: * SAT scores are highly correlated with intelligence * Intelligence is highly correlated with wealth * Intelligence is highly heritable (80% apparently)
jokethrowaway 6y ago
Asking rich parents on HN: Why bother sending your kid to ivy schools? I'm far from being rich, but I plan to pick a private but modest school / university for my children. Even if I were multimillionaire I wouldn't change this. My rationale is: - I don't want to deal with underpaid and possibly bitter public school teachers - It's not like you need an ivy school to find a job or be successful, that lies within you - Education is as useful as your kids will have a passion for, not how much you pay for an oversized planetarium - Rich kids sound like the worst people to surround your kid with
- qchris 6y ago
  > I'm far from being rich, but I plan to pick a private but modest school / university for my children. Even if I were multimillionaire I wouldn't change this. I'm genuinely a little confused by this sentence. You lay out your reasons below, but seem to be assuming you get to pick. By the time someone attends university, they're usually, you know, people. Adults in the 18+ sense, high school diploma, ability to get a job, have their own opinions about the world, access to federal student loans, etc. You'll have some influence in terms of the degree to which you'll support their decision and advice you can offer, but you don't get to pick anything, especially if your child is talented/driven enough to get into an Ivy League w/o being a socioeconomic outlier.
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    You're completely right, I admit I was mainly thinking about schools before university, given my kids are still very young. University will be their choice but - assuming I'll be the one to fork out money for uni - I will set a budget.
    - qchris 6y ago
      And that's totally within reason :) Just wanted to point out that they may choose something outside that. I know, personally, I was in a similar position, where my folks were willing/able to help, but I also chose a university that required that I take out an (imho, reasonable) amount of student loans to cover the difference. I remember the initial look of surprise on my parents face when I told them my decision, but even with the loan payments, I've yet to regret that choice.
threevox 6y ago
While there are elements of truth to the article's assertion (eg., legacy admissions), this narrative is mostly untrue and certainly unhelpful. Literally, if you study hard enough, you can go to an elite school if you want, full stop (source: did this myself.) The root of whatever "problem" may exist is mostly that kids from wealthier backgrounds are more often pressured by their parents to do the studying necessary to get into such a school. In my experience, everyone complaining about elite admissions is either a self-hating old-money grad of such a school, or is salty because they got a mediocre SAT score.
zepto 6y ago
It seems to me that ideally, college would admit some people as a result of family wealth, and some due to aptitude. The question is, what should the balance be? To explain: it’s simply a fact in our current society that people with wealth have outsized power and influence, even if they do not have special aptitude. In a society where wealth does accumulate, it seems beneficial for people with aptitude but not wealth to be able to build relationships with people who have wealth but not aptitude. Thus, society benefits from colleges admitting a mixture of the two.
nobodyandproud 6y ago
Okay, but what about middle income kids and families? Why did it omit a whole swath of information in order to make a point? How does the outcome of elite grads compare with those from public universities? Second tier colleges?
supernova87a 6y ago
You know how when people in South Korea, with their practically unlimited internet bandwidth, look at home internet usage caps in the US and laugh at such a silly problem? Someday when our fiber internet arrives, we'll also look back and wonder why did we ever need to debate net neutrality. Well it's kind of the same thing with university admissions. The problem that we've encountered is that the number of elite schools and admissions spots (established largely for the population of the post war growth economy) has not grown in proportion to the population. 1600 kids per freshman class has been the same for 30 years. And therefore the question of who gets in has gotten worse and worse as the number of kids competing has grown, and we're bickering over people's belief in different weighting schemes. What the US needs is more good schools. Not tinkering around the edges and theoretical arguments of whether rich kids deserve good schooling more than poor kids. That will get us nowhere in the big picture.
- marmaduke 6y ago
  What would happen if the US invested as much in education as it did in military?
  - _qulr 6y ago
    Well, it's possible that South Korea would be under the rule of Kim Jong-un right now. ;-)
  - xapata 6y ago
    So long as our fiction keeps us imagining ourselves as secretly royalty, we'll prefer dynasties to democracy. (And thus we prefer military.)
  - harryh 6y ago
    The US invests more in education than it does in the military. In 2019 the US spent roughly 720 billion on the military. Public spending on elementary and secondary (high schools) was about 740 billion. That doesn't count all spending on public colleges or any spending on private schools both of which are substantial.
LatteLazy 6y ago
I always tell the same stories in these comments, excuse me if you've read this before... When I started at university (in the uk, top 10 but not top 5), the admissions tutor (for the school of physics, not the whole place) who admitted my year group was forced to do the job. He considered himself a scientist (he was an FRS, a leader in his field after all). He looked at all the factors used for entry and found them all to be bs. Grades (predicted and actual), personal statements, references, extra curriculars, age/gender/socioeconomic group etc. So he admitted everyone that applied. He admitted people with low grades, he admitted people without the maths requirements (usually the most important grade for a physics under grad, you generally can't do any physics course without one). The result was a bumper class of 120ish instead of the usual 60ish. But by the end of the first year / start of second year, we were down to the usual number. Everyone else had transfered out, failed and left or was repeating the year. The interesting thing was that there were a few of the people who wouldn't usually have made it who did not transfer out. 2 of the 10 without the maths qualifications went on the get degrees. 1 is a teacher, the other got a PhD. His philosophy was that if someone could pass first year exams, labs, etc they deserved a spot in second year and so on. He didn't care what they came with. Just whether they passed. The chance he gave people was mostly wasted. But not entirely. He radically improved some people's lives. I only know because we got drunk together because he was my tutor and we had a very friendly tutorial group and relationship. As a straight A student with good extra curriculum activities, references, even work experience, I was scandalised and insulted to hear what he'd done. But I learned new definition of equality and it challenged me as a person. I think a lot of schools in particular work the other way around: hard to get in, then you just sit there for a few years and walk into jobs without further examination. That helps no one.
- ardit33 6y ago
  I feel that's what community colleges should be.. I went in high school in Virginia, and I know smart people, that wanted to stay close to home, for family reasons, and they went to community college. The mix of a community college is mix of very smart students, average folks, to straight up dummies.... but at least they have a second chance to perform well. Some one that does well, in a community college, should be transfered into a proper 4 year college. I know a lot of state schools do this, but it should be more common/normalized. Plus community colleges tend to be much cheaper.
Zdup 6y ago
Just want to add that parents play a major role. My parents, being highly educated and well off financially themselves, put enormous pressure on us to do well in school. We grew up with the idea that nothing surpasses the importance of performance in school. No (or little parties), no clubbing, no going out, we sacrificed our teenage years studying and as a result, that hard sacrifice paid out. It seems to me that the huge sacrifices we made are not accounted for at all (as if they don't exist) and the article only focuses on the parents financial status as a driver of success when in reality, talking with many or these students, is not the major driving factor, but the family culture and pressure from parents to perform in academia.
- dilatedmind 6y ago
  Also this, and maybe this is where social background comes into play. If my parents didn't value education, they wouldn't have moved us to a good school district or taken the time to look over my homework and assignments.
- learc83 6y ago
  There’s more too it that that. There are advantages to wealth that go beyond encouraging children to study instead of partying. Things like going to a good school, not having to work through high school, not dealing with money stress in general. And I don’t know that we necessarily want to encourage people to “sacrifice their teenage years” by rewarding people who do so. I did well on the SAT, and I didn’t spend all my time partying. But I definitely don’t feel like I sacrificed my teenage years. I certainly don’t want my children to look back on their childhood like that.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    That, and money allows you to cheat in this world. Bribery. Seen it happen on a private school. I believe earning some money for yourself as young kid (edit: specifically, I mean ~teen and later) is good, as it allows you to feel accomplished and teaches you to deal with money (ie. learning to save). It feels very different to do that with your own hard earned money than with pocket/birthday/clothing/allowance money. Not too much though, as the wage is ridiculously low, and the work likely repetitive and boring. It also teaches discipline. And that last word, is a keyword to higher success, on top of money. You need both; not either.
dilatedmind 6y ago
It's obvious the SAT does not measure native intelligence independent of education. I attribute my success in the SATs to the excellent teachers I had in high school. I didn't study at all and found that everything on the test had been covered by the classes I was already taking. As for social background, yeah, the wealthier you are, the easier it is to move to a good district. Yet, within a single school district, what difference would social background make?
emmelaich 6y ago
Timely -- I'm just reading J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy about an Appalachian upbringing and getting to Yale Law. He describes getting help from Amy Chua his professor who also has a lot to say about success in America - see her books Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom and more recently Political Tribes
Nasrudith 6y ago
I am puzzled when I see railing against meritocracy - what exactly is the alternative and how and why is it better? It is no wonder that the pejorative meaning didn't stick when there was a failure to show how it would be worse than the existing system. The obvious solution to the elite getting more opportunities is to increase the availability of it across the board to narrow the gap so others can meet their potential as well - meritocracy isn't guaranteed callous social darwinism. The only logical reason I can see is not wanting competition from those better.
intended 6y ago
There’s a term in gaming, that seems to apply here - playing the meta. Every time a game is released or a new patch changes the mechanics, a game is in a state of flux. New models are tried out, new build orders, and it’s more random, people experiment. Eventually though, the optimal strategy or set of strategies are known - the meta. It results in many striking metaphorical similarities 1) not following the meta gets you abuse in team games, and is generally going to be suboptimal. 2) the meta is not about fairness. If there is an unfair mechanic, well you had best be executing it better than the competition 3) the meta rewards people who can follow and execute, and significantly less towards experimenting new approaches. The game has only so many degrees of freedom so it’s not like there is much more you can do better than the meta. 4) related to 1, everyone does the meta. It’s the way to play. Eventually things get stale and boring, and only people who can Stomach/enjoy the meta get ahead.
sershe 6y ago
While I disagree with many things, if not everything, in this article (SAT/IQ/.../outcomes connections are well established; I come from a poor but well educated family and grew up surrounded by ethnically homogeneous poor and rich kids - from my "lived experience" I think culture is far more important than money; etc.), I want to explicitly disagree with the main premise, that equality is the preferred outcome in the "meritocracy creates inequality" tradeoff. It's an easy trap to fall into because the word it thrown around as a universal bad label, but I don't know why. I fundamentally don't understand what's wrong with inequality (and again, I grew up with hand-me-down clothing, eating a lot of sausages and potatoes :)). Other than the practical stability concerns, I think meritocracy has a moral dimension - you get what you deserve; whereas inequality has no moral dimension whatsoever. IMO everything should work like sports (with different curves, e.g. by the numbers, we need more surgeons than NFL quarterbacks). At 9, everyone can play soccer or football with pretty much equal opportunity and resources (and if not, this is what we should fix). By high school, some people drop off because they have no interest or talent, and the investment in other kids by the coaches/etc. skews towards the promising kids. By college, the teams are hunting for specific talented kids, and resources (scholarhip, team spots, etc.) are much more concentrated. And only few, in a pretty rigorous meritocracy, make it to the NFL. If someone has no talent/grit/muscles to play decent football, we don't think it's "bad" "inequality" that they didn't make it to the NFL. If someone has no talent/grit/IQ to learn to develop software it's not "inequality" they are not in a FAANG. If someone has little talent/grit/... at anything, why is it suddenly "unfair" that they cannot get anywhere?
musicale 6y ago
As others have pointed out, this excerpt contains some annoying logical errors and non-sequiturs. But the overall thesis is sound: in a merit-based system, parental wealth can still convey major advantages Even in the absence of SAT prep courses and private tutors, children of wealthy parents are likely to enjoy better nutrition, better health, better schools, etc.. (Remember that meritocracy was invented as a dystopian term rather than something positive.)

96 points by mcguire 6y ago

pontus 6y ago

I would say that the exception is grad school which is much more meritocratic than undergraduate admissions.

aurizon 6y ago
Yes, the profs do not want deadheads doing their research...
- pontus 6y ago
  More so because grad students receive grants that cover their tuition and some basic salary. In other words, unlike undergraduate students, graduate students actually costs money.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Are you sure you’re thinking of master’s students and not PhDs?
  - vector_spaces 6y ago
    Not all grad students get a salary. In particular older grad students who support other people and can't afford to live on a grad student stipend (which is a starvation wage for one, let alone more) and therefore must work a job while in grad school do not get any stipend, they pay their way. Which is of course a much easier arrangement for the student to manage if they have a trust fund or wealthy family to dip into (speaking to the article at hand)
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    "More so because grad students receive grants that cover their tuition and some basic salary." That only tends to be true for PHD programs where the student is expected to work on research that actually brings in grant money. That's not true for all grad programs. Some are not research-focused at all, and for those the student usually has to pay their own way or get other forms of financial aid (which not all students qualify for). Even if they do qualify for financial aid, they might not get any, if the limited amount that is available has already been given out to other qualified students.
forrestthewoods 6y ago
The abuse of grad and PhD students might be even more egregious than undergrad admissions. Paying objectively world class talent a meager $15,000 stipend to work themselves to the bone while they earn the university millions in grants and industry contracts, teach undergrad classes, and slave away on their own thesis. It’s super gross.
- manishsharan 6y ago
  Well .. there is an upside to this. Typically grad students who are employed by the university as RA or TA don't have to pay tuition . About 18 months of misery that opens up a world of opportunities.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    Highly dependent on the field nowadays IMO. A lot of masters programs exist as a way to make it easier to get a US visa.
  - forrestthewoods 6y ago
    18 months of misery for a Master ~7 years of misery for a PhD
- ksk 6y ago
  Please propose a solution too!
  - forrestthewoods 6y ago
    I work with many PhDs so I’m familiar with the problems. But I don’t know enough to have a solution. It may just be “pay them a living wage!”. Pay them $75,000 and call it a day. The waived tuition cost is BS. They aren’t undergrads living on campus and taking a half dozen classes. It doesn’t cost $50,000 / year to have a PhD student do lots of work for the school. Quite the opposite! The school makes a lot of money of their labor!! At least for STEM PhDs at research universities.
akhilcacharya 6y ago
I've heard that, but at the same time the people that go to top grad schools are also overwhelmingly people from top undergrads, likely because of professor relationships. I've talked to several people about my profile for grad school and the consensus is it's not good enough given my undergrad stature. I've talked to folks from schools like CMU and UIUC who got into elite grad schools without papers or ~3.9+ GPAs, but I'm already out of the running with these things with a degree from NC State. It's incredibly depressing to know I'm already shut out of most forms of social mobility at 24!
- mattgreenrocks 6y ago
  I’m not sure I buy this. If you’re wanting to go to grad school, go to grad school. Maybe you don’t go to an Ivy, but if you’re after the grad school experience then an Ivy is a nice potential bonus, not a necessary thing.
  - akhilcacharya 6y ago
    The opportunity cost of ~$150k a year x2-6 years doesn't work out unless it's an "impressive' name. NC State + Northeastern, for instance, on a resume doesn't engender respect even if they're both fine institutions on their own. NC State + MIT for instance does, but according to the several MIT profs I've talked to my resume straight up does not and will not cut it, so I'm sort of unimpressive for life as it seems.

aurizon 6y ago

Does the car(family) have the gas($$) for the entire trip? All that is needed is a gas gage...

_qulr 6y ago

I was accepted to Cornell as an undergrad, but my family couldn't afford it, so I had to go to a state university instead, with in-state tuition. My scores didn't even matter without the money.

glial 6y ago
Same here, but Reed and University of Chicago.
awat 6y ago
I wonder how common this story is, my brother was accepted to Penn but our family didn’t have the money. We both ended up at large state schools getting honors degrees. The whole decision making process for us was money based not merit based.
- _qulr 6y ago
  My high school friend was accepted to MIT, couldn't afford it, and also went to a state university. So that's 3!
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Got accepted at Berkeley, didn't get a scholarship that I needed, ended up studying in India instead. To be fair, you can always go to MIT or any top notch university for a graduate/second undergrad degree, but you can only go to IIT/NIT once.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    Usually big-name schools have high price tags but extremely generous financial aid. MIT: > Six out of every 10 students receive MIT need-based aid. the average price paid by an undergraduate receiving financial aid in 2019–2020 was $21,917—that’s approximately what it costs to attend a state school. And for students with family incomes under $90,000 a year, we ensure that scholarship funding will allow them to attend MIT tuition-free. Harvard puts the following numbers front and center: 20 % of Harvard families pay nothing 55 % receive Harvard scholarship aid 12 K average parent contribution 100 % of students can graduate debt-free Other schools in this tier have similar policies.

ppod 6y ago

>First, the SAT, it turns out, does not measure scholarly aptitude or native intelligence independent of social and educational background. To the contrary, SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth. Why start the article off with an obvious falsehood? The fact that SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth does not mean that none of the variation in scores is explained by aptitude. When people make the argument in this article they never seem to propose a fairer alternative. I'm suspicious that the criticism of SATs is actually a movement towards returning to patronage and nepotism.

devdas 6y ago
The claim is that parental wealth influences SAT scores more than intelligence.
- sova 6y ago
  Is that somehow related to being able to afford all the prep courses that are specifically for getting a high score on <insert standardized test acronym here>?
  - ec109685 6y ago
    That and attending better schools growing up.
  - applecrazy 6y ago
    I think this is largely false, and I took the SAT about 3 years ago. My only prep was a $25 book and some free official practice tests. Managed to get a 95th percentile score on my second try. My family could have afforded prep courses, but I wanted to prove to myself that it could be done for much less (which it was).
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  It's the claim, but it's not substantiated, it's just asserted.

grenoire 6y ago

The higher education situation in the US is quite depressing on quite a few angles, the (second?) biggest being the implicit income requirements for the crème de la crème. Any HN takes on how or if this can be addressed?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
treis 6y ago
I don't think it's really true anymore. Pretty much all the elite schools charge tuition on a sliding scale based on family income. No one that gets admitted to Yale "can't" afford it. With can't in quotations because the systems not perfect, but for the most part money is not going to stop you.
- grenoire 6y ago
  That's good to hear, I had heard that this is not true for all Ivy, and especially not for other high-tier ones without significantly big endowments or merit scholarship funds though. Just wanted to check up on what the opinion here was.
  - hydroxideOH- 6y ago
    Need-blind admissions only exists for a very small fraction of schools -- those that are in maybe the top 20? (I don't know the exact number). Also, it often leaves out middle class students, whose parents make too much to get substantial amount of aid, but don't make enough to pay the tuition out right without being buried in loans. Because of this, high achieving, middle class students often go to state schools, which often give merit scholarships (top-20 schools don't), and have much lower tuition.
  - an_opabinia 6y ago
    Every Gen X person I know who took out loans for professional school at top tier universities is richer than even people who were in technology in the early 2000s. They’re the ones who bought houses in all the gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re the ones with two or more kids, and they bought index funds with all that money, so the effects of going to a top tier university massively compounded. Some people have already pointed out that top tier universities have been discounted for the last decade. But even in 2000, Harvard college cost less than half of what it does now. Taking out loans to pay for Havard in 2000 would be the best investment you could ever make in your life, just considering that same inflation that partly raised Harvard’s tuition price also reduced the real cost of your debt. I believe the underlying problem is not financial literacy though.

forrestthewoods 6y ago

Meh. Article headline depends on your definition of “elite”. Admissions to the top 5 schools are broken. There’s more qualified students than there are slots. The only solution to that is more slots. If you get a 1500 on your SAT that’s a free ride to almost any university in the country. Especially if you come from an under-represented background. This includes Ivy League schools. But not Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT. The best ticket to a top 25 world class education is a high SAT score. It’s a free ticket available to anyone. I have many complaints about our university. But even a mediocre test score gets you a free ride to very very good state schools. Articles like this only reinforce the false necessity of Top 5 or Top 10 status.

sthnblllII 6y ago
If the students at these schools aren't any better than those at dozens of others high ranking schools, why are so many executives, judges and politicians graduates from these few school?
- watwut 6y ago
  Network effect and credentials. It does not matter who is objectively better if quality is similar. It matters what people assume when confronted with uncertainity.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  Different strokes for different folks, but if a school has a a lot of executives, judges and politicians graduate from them, that's a reason for me to avoid that school like the plague.
LukeShu 6y ago
> If you get a 1500 on your SAT A bit OT, but: I was going to say that the 1600 point scale hasn't been used for years (since 2005, when they switched to a 2400 point scale), but it turns out that they went back to the 1600 point scale in 2016.
- 6y ago

gnicholas 6y ago

Does the article say anything that substantiates the headline? I was expecting evidence of causality but didn’t see any when I skimmed through it. Did I miss it?

fakedang 6y ago
It's an Indian outlet, so it's likely targeting prospective Indian students and informing them beforehand.
- ec109685 6y ago
  It’s an excerpt from this book: The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374289980/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc_meRUFbR2XVC8B https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374289980/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc...
  - ec109685 6y ago
    Agree the SATs aren’t a great measure. I got a 1430 on the older version of them and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to spell Tyranny! It measures a very certain subset of skills.
mcguire 6y ago
It's an excerpt from the author's book.

bigpumpkin 6y ago

High family income matters for college admissions not because it causes a higher SAT score. People could study for the SAT regardless of income. It matters when elite admissions favor legacy students, athletes, and those with unique extracurricular activities. All of which favor the rich.

JamesBarney 6y ago

> First, the SAT, it turns out, does not measure scholarly aptitude or native intelligence independent of social and educational background Wouldn't this mean if you compared two groups of kids from the same income quintile one with a very low SAT score and one with a very high one they'd have the exact same life outcomes? I find this hard to believe. Also this study disagrees that coaching has much of an impact on SAT scores. https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2pva2jus90c1el/2012-montgomery.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2pva2jus90c1el/2012-montgomery.pd...

LatteLazy 6y ago
Not necessarily. There are an infinite number of characteristics other than those listed that might affect both SAT outcome and life outcome among those groups...
ardit33 6y ago
I think two poor kids, raised on the same neighborhood/conditions, measured with each other, SAT will give you a proxy for academic ability/IQ. Two wealthy kids, raised on the same neighborhood/conditions, measured with each other, SAT will give you a proxy for academic ability/IQ. That comparison might break down when measuring A poor kid, with a wealthy kid. Or a ESL student (english as foreign language, to a native speaker). The wealthy kids, probably went to better schools, had taken PRE-SATS since 8th grade, has tutor, and everything in between to get better. Poor kids are probably sharing a room with their parents, live in crappy conditions, and have to start working as teens to help out the family economically... All upper middle class folks know this: the more testing practice you do, the better you become at that test... SAT and IQ tests are a valid tool of measurement when two people have had the same conditions and training. Let me translate into engineering terms: Two engineers go to interview, one is good and has some great experience, the other one is average, but just LEETCODES for months before the interview. The average engineer gets the job, while the better one might not, as he probably didn't solve some Leetcode style of problem fast enough. Im real life scenarios, the good engineer would have outperformed the average one.
- mercutio2 6y ago

yandie 6y ago

I feel that the overall university admission process is broken. No matter how we evaluate people, we are prone to biases, and things like diversity and affirmative actions (whether you disagree with it or not) add another layer of complexity to the process. I like the idea from the powerball revolution epsiode of Revisionist History (http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revolution http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revo...). Why not have some filter to get the top students in to a pool, then randomly select them? I mean there are more qualified students than there are slots, so it's only "fair" if each of them get the same chance. No politics - just a pure number game at that point. You can argue the filter could create a disadvantage to poor students etc..., but you can adjust that in ways that the initial pool of potential applicants will be even. Of course when I mention the concept of randomly selecting a candidate, it makes people real uncomfortable :)

MattGaiser 6y ago
Well, no school wants to have selected some of the best, they want to select the best.
- yandie 6y ago
  What does "the best" really mean? At the end of the day I assume they want to optimize for future success. In that case we humans have been proven to be not very good at that in many other areas. And why can't you select a the best students and then randomly select among them? I don't believe that a 3.8 student will certainly perform worse than a 3.85 student, for example.
RestlessMind 6y ago
> I feel that the overall university admission process is broken. I agree and think the brokenness is in the limited number of opportunities. Why are Harvard and other Ivies the only ones that matter on your resume? Once a society limits the number of opportunities to reach the upper echelons, it is bound to set off scramble among all the parents, since everyone wants the best for their children. For some reasons, this is not only an American thing. I believe elite institutions in other countries as equally (or even more) selective.

rayiner 6y ago

> Second, the system of meritocratic admission that Conant promoted did not lead to the classless society he hoped it would produce. Inequalities of income and wealth have deepened since the 1940s and 1950s, and the social mobility that Conant saw as the remedy for a stratified society has not come about. The haves and have-nots have not been trading places from one generation to the next. This is demonstrably untrue. First, the article’s use of a family making $200,000 is telling. If you look around that people who are billionaires today, most did come from upper middle class families, but not necessarily wealthy ones. Mark Zuckerberg’s parents are a psychiatrist and a dentist. Opening wide the class of the most elite to the children of upper middle class professionals is in fact a huge societal achievement. Few societies have that kind of mobility. Another example is the economic mobility of Asians raised in the bottom 20% of income. These people lack both financial resources and social connections. But they have a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income as adults. Test-based meritocracy like the SAT is a huge enabler of that.

akhilcacharya 6y ago
> Opening wide the class of the most elite to the children of upper middle class professionals is in fact a huge societal achievement. Few societies have that kind of mobility. I have trouble agreeing with that, especially given the tendencies of pulling up the ladder. The billionaires are basically irrelevant because they're too small in number, the upper middle class and everyone else is the chasm that is widening by the day [0]. It's absolutely becoming or has become a stratified structure. [0] https://www.brookings.edu/book/dream-hoarders/ https://www.brookings.edu/book/dream-hoarders/

calibas 6y ago

I don't know how the industry could claim the SAT isn't coachable without knowing full well they were lying. The parents, teachers, and students knew when I was in high school 20 years ago, yet it was a secret to the industry? These people are the gatekeepers to a higher education, they should be held to higher standards.

rayiner 6y ago
The SAT isn’t really coachable for most people: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124278685697537839 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124278685697537839 > The college counselors' report concludes that, on average, prep courses yield only a modest benefit, "contrary to the claims made by many test-preparation providers." It found that SAT coaching resulted in about 30 points in score improvement on the SAT, out of a possible 1600, and less than one point out of a possible 36 on the ACT, the other main college-entrance exam, says Derek Briggs, chairman of the research and methodology department at the University of Colorado in Boulder and author of the admissions counselors' report. https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the... > Once scholars control for all these factors as best they can, they find that coaching has a positive but small effect: Perhaps 10 or 20 points in total on the SAT, mostly on the math section, according to careful work by Derek Briggs of the University of Colorado Boulder and Ben Domingue of Stanford University. > Some estimates run a little higher: A 2010 study led by Ohio State’s Claudia Buchmann and based on the National Education Longitudinal Study found that the use of books, videos, and computer software offers no boost whatsoever, while a private test prep course adds 30 points to your score on average, and the use of a private tutor adds 37.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  The exam is totally coachable, you just have to do cram school. Those studies look at private tutoring which spends possibly 1/20th of the time kids spend in cram school. Cram school is often conflated with private tutoring but they are completely different things.
  - 6y ago

RestlessMind 6y ago

> As we have seen, relatively few children of the poor rise to affluence, and relatively few children of affluence fall below the ranks of the upper-middle class. Notwithstanding the American dream of rising from rags to riches, upward mobility is less common in the United States than in many European countries, and there is no evidence of improvement in recent decades. This I believe is the crux of the problem in how the "upward mobility" is measured. If it is strictly by income/wealth quintiles, then it is strictly zero-sum. But is the world really a zero-sum game? I'd content that 80-90% people in USA / Western Europe have a far superior quality of life than the top-1% of the past on many metrics like health, nutrition or peace. So one can say that their entire societies were upwardly mobile from 1946 onward.

_qulr 6y ago
> relatively few children of affluence fall below the ranks of the upper-middle class Everyone talks about upward mobility, but we rarely talk about downward mobility. It's not impossible to go from "rags to riches", but who ever goes from riches to rags? It's not a true "meritocracy" unless the system reliably impoverishes the idiot children of the wealthy, but that almost never happens. The wealthy are protected, regardless of merit, and they take up space at or near the top of the system, reducing the number of positions open to more qualified candidates.
- RestlessMind 6y ago
  > unless the system reliably impoverishes the idiot children of the wealthy While I agree that the idiot children of the wealthy should not get to wield any significant influence on the society, "impoverishing them" doesn't seem like the right goal, since that might provoke a reaction from their wealthy parents who are driven, connected and talented. Rather, such idiots should be managed out on a safe landing, where they don't influence society at all but their parents are still not worried about their future.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > "impoverishing them" doesn't seem like the right goal I don't think anyone should be impoverished, and indeed I'm not a supporter of the idea of "meritocracy", but I think it's fair to take the arguments for it to their logical and abhorrent conclusion. After all, the supporters seem perfectly content to allow the non-wealthy (and assumed non-meritorious) to become impoverished.

ausjke 6y ago

statistically speaking, most high-income family implies parents with more self-discipline, better hard-working attitude, and normally they spend a lot more time with their kids' growth,etc. in this fancy socialism-is-the-future era, our system now punishes "the evil rich" to make sure we are all going to have 'equity-result', as said the 'road-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intention', guess what, those true 'bad' rich family always knows how to circumvent any rules that is targeting them, in the end it's always the honest hard-working high-income family got punished. saying rich-family is key to elite university, is the same as saying exercise-person lives longer, the 'rich' or 'exercise' are nothing to blame most of the time. "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries" this kind of report is absolutely trash.

ec109685 6y ago
Sorry, how are rich people being punished in this straw man vision of reality of yours? I came from a well off family (who were on food stamps when I was first born — socialism FTW), and had tons of advantages while I meandered through college before eventually graduating. I was not overly disciplined but had many extra chances someone from less means would not have.
- ausjke 6y ago
  food stamp is fine unless it's abused, it's designed to level the play field, the so-called 'equal opportunity'. poor family already got helped there. some made it by this help, many did not. so the trend now becomes 'equity result', which will make nobody wants to work hard anymore, that's socialism at its worst. this is also called mob to the hard working "rich" families. US is moving to that direction, fast. by the way, I was from a poor family, and now barely made it. I would rather keep working my way up instead of seeing socialism-for-equity-result here. I also hope for those who depends on food-stamp and now is in good shape, donating to the community, and always be thankful to other taxpayers who gave you and your family a hand, money is not from air, it's from other working persons' pocket.
  - 6y ago

mensetmanusman 6y ago

It’s not a surprise that the Ivy league exists to educate the children of the wealthy. What is a surprise is that the Ivy leagues and the wealthy are ashamed to admit this. I think people wouldn’t get all worked up about this if people would be more honest. Yes, there will always be some income differences, yes, some people self fragment into groups by race, class, interests, etc. when given a choice. What you see are natural consequences of people’s decisions.

smallnamespace 6y ago
Elite institutions want to admit who they think will be the future elite, because they will be writing the alumni checks, serving as trustees, and providing a prestigious halo around the institution. As someone who attended an Ivy, it is simply untrue that it's mostly blue-blood old money hobnobbing around. First, there's not enough of them to fill the classes every year. Second, wealthy people themselves want their children to be educated with other smart kids.
- pc86 6y ago
  I don't think the argument is that most of the people at Ivies are blue blood WASPs. I think the argument is that if you happen to be a blue blood WASP you are disproportionately likely to get in regardless (or in spite of, in the case of legacies and donors) your merit.
  - xhkkffbf 6y ago
    This is almost certainly not the case any more. It was at one time, but it isn't. Princeton's recent incoming class was more than 60% what they called "persons of color", a term that included all Asians. Among the people who might be called whites, Jews were easily 20-30%. If you start to filter out Catholics, there just aren't that many WASPs at these places anymore. For extra credit, go look up how many WASPs are on the Supreme Court. How many years has it been this way? The stereotypes just don't fit and haven't for some time.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

csa 6y ago

A few comments on this book excerpt: - For the most part, high SATs are tables stakes for applying to elite schools, they are not the deciding factor. The exceptions are for athletes and other folks with preferred admissions. I don’t know why people continue to think that great grades and high SAT scores are the main or only factors in elite school admissions — the admissions materials themselves make it abundantly clear that they are looking for more. - All that said, the “more” mentioned above is typically easier to access if you come from a high income family. - The excerpt mentions low % of students who go from bottom quintile to top quintile after an elite education (~2%). Is that 2% of the total student body or 2% of the bottom quintile elite school students? This is unclear to me, but if it’s the former, that’s probably a big win since lowest quintile students are a small part of the student body to begin with. - Note that some (many?) jumps from bottom quintile to top quintile may just be a well-off family that ran into bad times. This happened to a friend of mine — wealthy family one generation, the next generation lost it to drugs and alcohol, and the third generation reverted back to wealthy. - The leap from the bottom quintile to the top typically requires much more than education. There are a ton of soft skills that are common in the top quintile that are foreign or antithetical to people from the bottom quintile —- general communication, conflict resolution, attitudes towards money, socializing skills, etc. Without these skills, it’s really tough to make it to the top quintile unless you effectively hit the time-in-history and degree lottery with a FAANG-type of high paying job. Even then, someone from the bottom quintile will have limited upside without the soft skills mentioned above. - To close, I wish people would stop presenting elite schools as the gateway to riches or even a stable high income. Learning how to play the “game” that the top quintile plays is much more important than where someone went to school. Obviously schooling (esp. elite schooling) is part of that game, but based on the wide variety of winners in the game that I have known, the soft skills I have mentioned are a much more common and salient trait than an elite schooling.

djg321 6y ago
This got me thinking: how can someone who didn't grow up with the relevant soft skills learn them later in life? Are there any specific books or places to role play these soft skills that are recommended?

hnracer 6y ago

The first sentence seems factually incorrect or at least appears to be a bare assertion without basis. "SAT ... does not measure ... native intelligence independent of social or educational background." Studies have found an extremely high correlation between SAT and g-factor. Is this correlation completely due to social and educational factors? That's quite a strong claim and I would need to see some compelling evidence for it. The correlation between SAT and wealth is not surprising. Wealth and g-factor are also correlated. In addition, g-factor of parents is extremely highly correlated to that of their kids through both genetics and upbringing. That there exists a transitive correlation between all of parental wealth, child-g, parental-g, and child-SAT is totally expected from our understanding of intelligence in the literature. Wealth as a driver independent of g needs to be explicitly tested for in a multivariable model (has this been done?).

k__ 6y ago

"SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth" Isn't this kinda obvious? I mean, if you have parents that can teach you stuff or pay someone to teach you additionally to the stuff you learn at school you'll always fare better. I don't think there can be a way to measure any kind of aptitude independently from your upbringing. We don't need better tests, we need to help parents to raise better children.

haihaibye 6y ago
Yes it's obvious if 3 things are true: * SAT scores are highly correlated with intelligence * Intelligence is highly correlated with wealth * Intelligence is highly heritable (80% apparently)

jokethrowaway 6y ago

Asking rich parents on HN: Why bother sending your kid to ivy schools? I'm far from being rich, but I plan to pick a private but modest school / university for my children. Even if I were multimillionaire I wouldn't change this. My rationale is: - I don't want to deal with underpaid and possibly bitter public school teachers - It's not like you need an ivy school to find a job or be successful, that lies within you - Education is as useful as your kids will have a passion for, not how much you pay for an oversized planetarium - Rich kids sound like the worst people to surround your kid with

qchris 6y ago
> I'm far from being rich, but I plan to pick a private but modest school / university for my children. Even if I were multimillionaire I wouldn't change this. I'm genuinely a little confused by this sentence. You lay out your reasons below, but seem to be assuming you get to pick. By the time someone attends university, they're usually, you know, people. Adults in the 18+ sense, high school diploma, ability to get a job, have their own opinions about the world, access to federal student loans, etc. You'll have some influence in terms of the degree to which you'll support their decision and advice you can offer, but you don't get to pick anything, especially if your child is talented/driven enough to get into an Ivy League w/o being a socioeconomic outlier.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  You're completely right, I admit I was mainly thinking about schools before university, given my kids are still very young. University will be their choice but - assuming I'll be the one to fork out money for uni - I will set a budget.
  - qchris 6y ago
    And that's totally within reason :) Just wanted to point out that they may choose something outside that. I know, personally, I was in a similar position, where my folks were willing/able to help, but I also chose a university that required that I take out an (imho, reasonable) amount of student loans to cover the difference. I remember the initial look of surprise on my parents face when I told them my decision, but even with the loan payments, I've yet to regret that choice.

threevox 6y ago

While there are elements of truth to the article's assertion (eg., legacy admissions), this narrative is mostly untrue and certainly unhelpful. Literally, if you study hard enough, you can go to an elite school if you want, full stop (source: did this myself.) The root of whatever "problem" may exist is mostly that kids from wealthier backgrounds are more often pressured by their parents to do the studying necessary to get into such a school. In my experience, everyone complaining about elite admissions is either a self-hating old-money grad of such a school, or is salty because they got a mediocre SAT score.

zepto 6y ago

It seems to me that ideally, college would admit some people as a result of family wealth, and some due to aptitude. The question is, what should the balance be? To explain: it’s simply a fact in our current society that people with wealth have outsized power and influence, even if they do not have special aptitude. In a society where wealth does accumulate, it seems beneficial for people with aptitude but not wealth to be able to build relationships with people who have wealth but not aptitude. Thus, society benefits from colleges admitting a mixture of the two.

nobodyandproud 6y ago

Okay, but what about middle income kids and families? Why did it omit a whole swath of information in order to make a point? How does the outcome of elite grads compare with those from public universities? Second tier colleges?

supernova87a 6y ago

You know how when people in South Korea, with their practically unlimited internet bandwidth, look at home internet usage caps in the US and laugh at such a silly problem? Someday when our fiber internet arrives, we'll also look back and wonder why did we ever need to debate net neutrality. Well it's kind of the same thing with university admissions. The problem that we've encountered is that the number of elite schools and admissions spots (established largely for the population of the post war growth economy) has not grown in proportion to the population. 1600 kids per freshman class has been the same for 30 years. And therefore the question of who gets in has gotten worse and worse as the number of kids competing has grown, and we're bickering over people's belief in different weighting schemes. What the US needs is more good schools. Not tinkering around the edges and theoretical arguments of whether rich kids deserve good schooling more than poor kids. That will get us nowhere in the big picture.

marmaduke 6y ago
What would happen if the US invested as much in education as it did in military?
- _qulr 6y ago
  Well, it's possible that South Korea would be under the rule of Kim Jong-un right now. ;-)
- xapata 6y ago
  So long as our fiction keeps us imagining ourselves as secretly royalty, we'll prefer dynasties to democracy. (And thus we prefer military.)
- harryh 6y ago
  The US invests more in education than it does in the military. In 2019 the US spent roughly 720 billion on the military. Public spending on elementary and secondary (high schools) was about 740 billion. That doesn't count all spending on public colleges or any spending on private schools both of which are substantial.

LatteLazy 6y ago

I always tell the same stories in these comments, excuse me if you've read this before... When I started at university (in the uk, top 10 but not top 5), the admissions tutor (for the school of physics, not the whole place) who admitted my year group was forced to do the job. He considered himself a scientist (he was an FRS, a leader in his field after all). He looked at all the factors used for entry and found them all to be bs. Grades (predicted and actual), personal statements, references, extra curriculars, age/gender/socioeconomic group etc. So he admitted everyone that applied. He admitted people with low grades, he admitted people without the maths requirements (usually the most important grade for a physics under grad, you generally can't do any physics course without one). The result was a bumper class of 120ish instead of the usual 60ish. But by the end of the first year / start of second year, we were down to the usual number. Everyone else had transfered out, failed and left or was repeating the year. The interesting thing was that there were a few of the people who wouldn't usually have made it who did not transfer out. 2 of the 10 without the maths qualifications went on the get degrees. 1 is a teacher, the other got a PhD. His philosophy was that if someone could pass first year exams, labs, etc they deserved a spot in second year and so on. He didn't care what they came with. Just whether they passed. The chance he gave people was mostly wasted. But not entirely. He radically improved some people's lives. I only know because we got drunk together because he was my tutor and we had a very friendly tutorial group and relationship. As a straight A student with good extra curriculum activities, references, even work experience, I was scandalised and insulted to hear what he'd done. But I learned new definition of equality and it challenged me as a person. I think a lot of schools in particular work the other way around: hard to get in, then you just sit there for a few years and walk into jobs without further examination. That helps no one.

ardit33 6y ago
I feel that's what community colleges should be.. I went in high school in Virginia, and I know smart people, that wanted to stay close to home, for family reasons, and they went to community college. The mix of a community college is mix of very smart students, average folks, to straight up dummies.... but at least they have a second chance to perform well. Some one that does well, in a community college, should be transfered into a proper 4 year college. I know a lot of state schools do this, but it should be more common/normalized. Plus community colleges tend to be much cheaper.

Zdup 6y ago

Just want to add that parents play a major role. My parents, being highly educated and well off financially themselves, put enormous pressure on us to do well in school. We grew up with the idea that nothing surpasses the importance of performance in school. No (or little parties), no clubbing, no going out, we sacrificed our teenage years studying and as a result, that hard sacrifice paid out. It seems to me that the huge sacrifices we made are not accounted for at all (as if they don't exist) and the article only focuses on the parents financial status as a driver of success when in reality, talking with many or these students, is not the major driving factor, but the family culture and pressure from parents to perform in academia.

dilatedmind 6y ago
Also this, and maybe this is where social background comes into play. If my parents didn't value education, they wouldn't have moved us to a good school district or taken the time to look over my homework and assignments.
learc83 6y ago
There’s more too it that that. There are advantages to wealth that go beyond encouraging children to study instead of partying. Things like going to a good school, not having to work through high school, not dealing with money stress in general. And I don’t know that we necessarily want to encourage people to “sacrifice their teenage years” by rewarding people who do so. I did well on the SAT, and I didn’t spend all my time partying. But I definitely don’t feel like I sacrificed my teenage years. I certainly don’t want my children to look back on their childhood like that.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  That, and money allows you to cheat in this world. Bribery. Seen it happen on a private school. I believe earning some money for yourself as young kid (edit: specifically, I mean ~teen and later) is good, as it allows you to feel accomplished and teaches you to deal with money (ie. learning to save). It feels very different to do that with your own hard earned money than with pocket/birthday/clothing/allowance money. Not too much though, as the wage is ridiculously low, and the work likely repetitive and boring. It also teaches discipline. And that last word, is a keyword to higher success, on top of money. You need both; not either.

dilatedmind 6y ago

It's obvious the SAT does not measure native intelligence independent of education. I attribute my success in the SATs to the excellent teachers I had in high school. I didn't study at all and found that everything on the test had been covered by the classes I was already taking. As for social background, yeah, the wealthier you are, the easier it is to move to a good district. Yet, within a single school district, what difference would social background make?

emmelaich 6y ago

Timely -- I'm just reading J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy about an Appalachian upbringing and getting to Yale Law. He describes getting help from Amy Chua his professor who also has a lot to say about success in America - see her books Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom and more recently Political Tribes

Nasrudith 6y ago

I am puzzled when I see railing against meritocracy - what exactly is the alternative and how and why is it better? It is no wonder that the pejorative meaning didn't stick when there was a failure to show how it would be worse than the existing system. The obvious solution to the elite getting more opportunities is to increase the availability of it across the board to narrow the gap so others can meet their potential as well - meritocracy isn't guaranteed callous social darwinism. The only logical reason I can see is not wanting competition from those better.

intended 6y ago

There’s a term in gaming, that seems to apply here - playing the meta. Every time a game is released or a new patch changes the mechanics, a game is in a state of flux. New models are tried out, new build orders, and it’s more random, people experiment. Eventually though, the optimal strategy or set of strategies are known - the meta. It results in many striking metaphorical similarities 1) not following the meta gets you abuse in team games, and is generally going to be suboptimal. 2) the meta is not about fairness. If there is an unfair mechanic, well you had best be executing it better than the competition 3) the meta rewards people who can follow and execute, and significantly less towards experimenting new approaches. The game has only so many degrees of freedom so it’s not like there is much more you can do better than the meta. 4) related to 1, everyone does the meta. It’s the way to play. Eventually things get stale and boring, and only people who can Stomach/enjoy the meta get ahead.

sershe 6y ago

While I disagree with many things, if not everything, in this article (SAT/IQ/.../outcomes connections are well established; I come from a poor but well educated family and grew up surrounded by ethnically homogeneous poor and rich kids - from my "lived experience" I think culture is far more important than money; etc.), I want to explicitly disagree with the main premise, that equality is the preferred outcome in the "meritocracy creates inequality" tradeoff. It's an easy trap to fall into because the word it thrown around as a universal bad label, but I don't know why. I fundamentally don't understand what's wrong with inequality (and again, I grew up with hand-me-down clothing, eating a lot of sausages and potatoes :)). Other than the practical stability concerns, I think meritocracy has a moral dimension - you get what you deserve; whereas inequality has no moral dimension whatsoever. IMO everything should work like sports (with different curves, e.g. by the numbers, we need more surgeons than NFL quarterbacks). At 9, everyone can play soccer or football with pretty much equal opportunity and resources (and if not, this is what we should fix). By high school, some people drop off because they have no interest or talent, and the investment in other kids by the coaches/etc. skews towards the promising kids. By college, the teams are hunting for specific talented kids, and resources (scholarhip, team spots, etc.) are much more concentrated. And only few, in a pretty rigorous meritocracy, make it to the NFL. If someone has no talent/grit/muscles to play decent football, we don't think it's "bad" "inequality" that they didn't make it to the NFL. If someone has no talent/grit/IQ to learn to develop software it's not "inequality" they are not in a FAANG. If someone has little talent/grit/... at anything, why is it suddenly "unfair" that they cannot get anywhere?

musicale 6y ago

As others have pointed out, this excerpt contains some annoying logical errors and non-sequiturs. But the overall thesis is sound: in a merit-based system, parental wealth can still convey major advantages Even in the absence of SAT prep courses and private tutors, children of wealthy parents are likely to enjoy better nutrition, better health, better schools, etc.. (Remember that meritocracy was invented as a dystopian term rather than something positive.)