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Think critically about college admissions

• cortesoft 5y ago
  The article makes some good points, but I thought this was incorrect: > The only reason to tweet a graph or chart at someone rather than to report a coefficient of determination is to obfuscate. That isn't true. They use graphs and charts because most people don't understand what a coefficient of determination is. If you tweeted out that number, your tweet would not convince anyone because they wouldn't know what it means.
  • analog31 5y ago
    Granted, I'm not a statistician, so maybe I don't trust myself to use statistics blindly, but the first thing I do when I calculate a statistic is to look at a graph to see if the statistic is believable.
  • murgindrag 5y ago
    It means very little. I can show several charts with the same coefficient, and they'll mean very different things.
• rashkov 5y ago
  To anyone else wondering what the term SES means, my best guess is “socioeconomic status”.
  • autarch 5y ago
    That is correct.
• b9a2cab5 5y ago
  The author makes a good point but focuses on schools where affirmative action is legal. In contrast, schools where it's illegal (like for example, public schools in California and Washington) are dropping the SAT because it allows them to admit "holistically" and thereby admit more "desired" ("underrepresented") minorities because a larger percentage of the application is subjective. I find this particularly egregious because voters in both states rejected affirmative action very recently and yet the state funded administrations of these schools are going ahead with these policies.
  • ixacto 5y ago
    Time to fire the admissions staff for not enacting the will of the voters.
    • threatofrain 5y ago
      IMO unelected officials aren’t meant to represent voters. They’re employed roles.
      • HKH2 5y ago
        Is not the ultimate goal of the state to serve its citizens?
        • threatofrain 5y ago
          I think there's a difference in an employed role where you can be hired and fired vs. a political office where voters determine occupancy.
          • HKH2 5y ago
            Sure, relatively apolitical offices should be more distant from the voting process, but they should also act relatively apolitically, otherwise they might as well be determined by voters, directly or indirectly.
          • ixacto 5y ago
            The only problem is that this is arguably a political decision by a non-political employed role.
        • ppf 5y ago
          Exactly, and what could be better for all than equality and diversity? Obviously what's best for all isn't best for everyone. /s
      • murgindrag 5y ago
• DistressedDrone 5y ago
  I don't mean to attack the author rather than the article, but it's hard to take them seriously when they use terms like "liberals hate" and "lol" in an article that aims to be empirical. It's just so needlessly adversarial?
  • batch12 5y ago
    Yeah. I find intentionally divisive articles like this hard to respect. The author is either trying to game engagement through division or insultingly bucket people into their camps because they really see the world this way. I wish people would stop legitimizing this. Edited- fixed stuff, finished my thought
    • TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
      I find the concept of removing entrance tests so more black people can be accepted into college divisive too. Sometimes divisive issues just need to be addressed head-on in a way that avoids unnecessary flamebait or emotional amplification. I feel the article did an OK job at that, considering how sensitive the topic is.
  • testfoobar 5y ago
    Unfortunately, having a thoughtful discussion on college admissions is seemingly impossible. I'm a member of a number of alumni groups of academic institutions and have seen Facebook discussions devolve quite like the author describes. Presenting actual data refuting emotionally held positions gets you labeled and libeled.
  • evilotto 5y ago
    I completely agree. Up until the final paragraph of the article, the point the author seemed to be making is "rich people will do better in college so only rich people should go to college."
    • chongli 5y ago
      If the author gave you that impression then he truly failed to communicate his point. The author is a Marxist who has written a book (plugged in the article) against the entire system of education-based meritocracy. He most certainly does not believe education should be reserved exclusively for the rich. Instead, he’s in favour of a large social safety net that allows struggling students to opt out of the education system without giving up on life.
• HDMI_Cable 5y ago
  As someone who is currently thinking quite a bit about university admissions (I accepted an offer today, and made a post about it)[1], I think this is sidestepping the main concern: school overcrowding. Being of a certain minority group, even if I had a perfect prodigal SAT + GPA combo, I would have a 15% chance of getting in. At that point there is no point to taking the SAT, if it's all random chance. [2] Note: I definitely did not have a perfect GPA, or any SAT. Getting rid of the SAT has zero effect on whether I get in. I still agree with him overall, but until we can get to a point where if you get good grades, you get a spot at a proportionally good university, worrying about the SAT will not matter. --- [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302928 [2]: https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/ https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/
• naveen99 5y ago
  what’s interesting is that there aren’t enough medical student seats in the usa to fill the residency spots in the usa. Why is it that other countries have more medical student seats than residency seats ? It’s because medical schools have quotas, whereas they don’t have quotas against over represented groups in residency. Same reason we don’t have enough engineering seats in the usa and use H1B to fill in engineering positions in Silicon Valley. Colleges have quotas, Silicon Valley doesn’t. Schools have quotas, reality / the market doesn’t. If you look globally, you don't even need quotas. The world is approximately 65% Asian, so is the student body at magnet high schools with merit based entrance tests. the world is approximately 5% African.
  • unishark 5y ago
    > Same reason we don’t have enough engineering seats in the usa and use H1B to fill in engineering positions in Silicon Valley. Colleges have quotas, Silicon Valley doesn’t. Lower tier engineering schools have room. And anyone can start a program. They're just filling seats with other things, like master's programs. But they'd rather have undergrads. And the ranking of these schools would increase as they got better students. The simple problem is not enough people want to major in engineering. The situation is the same everywhere (China/India are just bigger). But those places can't raise salaries to resolve it. US tech leaders clearly can. The H1B helped keep this from resolving itself the normal way, i.e. where companies have to pay more to attract people to the field. I think it also relocated a big chunk of the developing world's tech growth to the US, so American executives could be the ones who benefited from it (yay for them). So it makes the domestic shortcoming worse in two ways.
    • 908B64B197 5y ago
      > The simple problem is not enough people want to major in engineering. Or can. A lot of schools are happy to admit almost anyone, but will have 1/3 of incoming freshmen transfer to other majors after a year. > I think it also relocated a big chunk of the developing world's tech growth to the US, so American executives could be the ones who benefited from it (yay for them) Employees too. It lowers the wages a little, but creates a much bigger market where software for the world is built in America. So there's more competitors. It's not uncommon for American companies to have half of their revenues in international markets but way less than 50% foreign employees.
• doggodaddo78 5y ago
  Bias: I almost aced the SAT-I (/1600) without studying but I made a dumb error on one question on the math section. GATE had zero effect (I always wondered if their primary purpose was to inventory smart kids for potentially-surreptitious scenarios and needs). I didn't even bother applying to Ivys or Pac12s where "everyone else" was going because those places didn't interest me. Other people got full/partial rides to Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley, etc. but I kept looking. --- Oh good, so merit is out the window. So what was the net good of shipping me 3 hours by bus roundtrip per day to a crappier school across town? (Waking-up before 5 am.) Oh that's right, because there were too many other white and/or Asian kids in the school a block from my house. I guess I just didn't have the right skin color. Leave it to 80's Californian affirmative action to "fix" schools with culture-shock, not fitting-in, racism, violence, and gang warfare. "We'll get you, whitey/Asian, by giving you our pain. That'll teach you not to be white/Asian." is the message it sends. So this grand social experiment is so the kids who didn't earn admissions can get a degree they won't earn to get a job they won't earn so they won't know anything but entitlement because social justice through identity promotion fixes everything. That'll teach all those hard-working overachievers' parents to move to a different country like Finland, send China's sea turtles to go elsewhere, and destroy what was once America's greatest advantage. Oh yeah and you know, the scientific method is "racist" (I, no shit, had a roommate applicant tell me this with a straight face recently). I became so flabbergasted I couldn't talk to them anymore. This makes me sad. Instead of becoming more meritocratic and fairer, we're further entrenching racism and discrimination without calling it that. Orwellian doublespeak and doublethink. What would MLK Jr think of all this? Let's just have no standards of excellence at all and give everyone an Ivy or Pac12 degree for participation. Double gold stars if people in any of your attribute groups ever had anything bad happen to them. First peoples? Slaves? Armenians? Jews? Italians? Irish? Spanish? Where does it stop? At some point we just have to say "enough," or it devolves into absurdity and dishonesty when admissions are unmoored pure merit and reality. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
  • bigbillheck 5y ago
    > Leave it to 80's Californian affirmative action to "fix" schools with culture-shock, not fitting-in, racism, violence, and gang warfare. There's not a lot of easy solutions to undoing decades of segregation. > didn't even bother applying to Ivys or Pac12s where "everyone else" was going because those places didn't interest me. Based on your username and talking about the 80s I'm going to guess you were born in 1978, i.e. are roughly the same age as me. I find it interesting you talk about "Pac12" (and it's not just a typo, you do it a lot) considering that until 2011 it was the "Pac10". For those not familiar with US college sports, the Pac10 at the time doggodaddo78 and I would have been applying to college was, in vague north-to-south order, University of Washington, Washington State University, University of Oregon, Oregon State University, UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, University of Southern California, University of Arizona, and Arizona State University. The Pac12 retains those same teams, but adds University of Colorado and University of Utah. There's definitely some world-class schools in there, but with respect to all the Cougs I've ever known, I would not put, say, Washington State among the greats. (Disclaimer: I was accepted to two of those Pac10 schools but could not afford to go to either, so went instead to a smaller state school).
• smbv 5y ago
  Link without tracking params: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-think-critically-about-college https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-think-critically...
• MyHypatia 5y ago
  I think we should use SAT II or AP style subject tests for college admissions instead of SAT. 1) It's standardized so we can compare apples to apples. 2) Students spend time studying material that is a) taught in schools and b) they can pick their strongest subjects. 3) Subject exams are more reflective of what college is actually like: can you learn material on a particular subject and pass an exam on it? 4) I think the SAT test as a measure of "general intelligence" is too broad and vague, and that makes it both more controversial and less useful. If a student is terrible at math they should still be able to go to college and excel in language. If a student is terrible at language but they love math, they should be able to go to college for that. Forcing people to take a "general intelligence" exam when college is about specializing in a particular major isn't a good metric in my opinion. Students could devote that time to other things: studying particular subjects that are relevant to what they may want to study. I also find the tone of the article obnoxious. The author basically says that people who disagree with him aren't thinking critically. Sure, some of them. But there are plenty of people who have thought critically about this and disagree with the author. Also all the zingers about "liberals" are idiotic. Not everyone who disagrees with him is a liberal. It's unnecessarily divisive, and frankly makes it seem like the author is lazily throwing everyone into 2 buckets: conservative or liberal rather than thinking critically. Ironic.
  • mbg721 5y ago
    Many (most?) students change majors after entering college, so there would have to be some way of dealing with that. But in addition, colleges philosophically still push the idea that their purpose is to produce well-rounded human beings, and bristle at being reduced to hyper-specialized vocational training, even if in practice a lot of that actually happens.
    • MyHypatia 5y ago
      To be clear, I'm not advocating for students get pigeonholed into a particular major because of the subject exams they took. They should be free to change majors the same as they do now. Passing 1 or 2 subject tests just shows that a student can: pick a subject, study it, and pass an exam on it. Which is what almost every class in college is like. There is no "general intelligence" class in college, or high school. Studying for a general intelligence test is not what college, high school, or any job is actually like. Studying for a test in a particular subject is useful for high school, college, and a requirement for some jobs (i.e. law, medicine, etc.)
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  For those interested in this topic also see this article previously discussed on HN, titled “America is flunking math”, by three university professors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27202337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27202337 Also see this past discussion on Harvard dropping test scores: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535528 The expected impact of these changes in testing is that admissions will be less about merit, and effectively punish Asian students who are on average more meritorious and therefore earn more college seats than you would expect based on their population numbers. Therefore these other discussions about “holistic” admissions processes are also worth visiting: Harvard rating Asian students lower on personality traits as part of their “holistic” admissions process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320360 More on quirks of Harvard’s admissions, like their “z-list”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17641360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17641360 Yale’s discrimination against Asians: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352