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> At any given university, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. This is a necessary consequence of private schools impro

by dfdz 5y ago

> At any given university, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. This is a necessary consequence of private schools improving kids' admissions prospects, and parents wouldn't send their kids to private schools if they didn't. Is there data to backup this claim? In my experience most of the top students at top universities attended private high schools. (I went to public school) This might be enough to make the average private school student smarter than the average public school student. It seems likely that the median public school student is smarter than the median private school student, based on the same reasoning in the tweet (but that is less encouraging)

avmich 5y ago
> This might be enough to make the average private school student smarter than the average public school student. Note that here we're talking about something different - namely, that _at any given university_, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. We don't talk about all kids - only kids in universities, and there is selection filter for who gets there, so in universities the distribution of "smartness" for private or public school kids is different than in schools. In other words, maybe you're right and the average private school student is smarter than the average public school student. But it's not the average student who gets to a university. There was once a stable state when many universities had several candidates for each place, and could choose whom to admit. Theoretically, the better the university the bigger the pool of candidates it has. However some universities were notoriously hard to get to, so candidates didn't even bother to apply there. As a result, the candidate pools in those universities were smaller, but those candidates were of a different kind - as if they have already passed pre-filter which made them more confident that they are those special ones who has better than average chance to get to those hard to get universities.

by dfdz 5y ago

avmich 5y ago

> This might be enough to make the average private school student smarter than the average public school student. Note that here we're talking about something different - namely, that _at any given university_, the kids from public schools are smarter than the kids from private schools. We don't talk about all kids - only kids in universities, and there is selection filter for who gets there, so in universities the distribution of "smartness" for private or public school kids is different than in schools. In other words, maybe you're right and the average private school student is smarter than the average public school student. But it's not the average student who gets to a university. There was once a stable state when many universities had several candidates for each place, and could choose whom to admit. Theoretically, the better the university the bigger the pool of candidates it has. However some universities were notoriously hard to get to, so candidates didn't even bother to apply there. As a result, the candidate pools in those universities were smaller, but those candidates were of a different kind - as if they have already passed pre-filter which made them more confident that they are those special ones who has better than average chance to get to those hard to get universities.