Does it even make sense trying to "democratize" (read: loosen the standards of) highly-selective schools? Aren't they desirable precisely because they are selec

Does it even make sense trying to "democratize" (read: loosen the standards of) highly-selective schools? Aren't they desirable precisely because they are selective, so their students share classes with similar high-achievers, enabling more challenging learning? Of course the article opens by delegitimizing any sort of familial intergenerational help and solidarity. If it can't be done in one generation, then it's not worth doing at all, so goes the NY Times' logic. Edit: My disdain for the NY Times grows. The first clue was how stingy the article was with statistics. From the article: the goal is not a spot in just any of the 160 schools but admission to eight or nine that are especially competitive, prestigious and largely dominated by white and Asian families Note the phrase "white and Asian". So, how much "dominating" is each group doing, separately? The article doesn't substantiate its claim, but we can find out. According to [1], NYC is 35.1% non-Hispanic white and 13.9% Asian. Summing the numbers in [2], the presumably top 8 specialized schools in NYC are 28.5% non-Hispanic white and 51% Asian. So whites are under-represented by a factor of 0.81 (and a minority in both NYC and the schools), and Asians over-represented by a factor of 3.67 (and a majority in the schools). And this the Times calls "dominated by white and Asian" - with "white" in first place even! I never thought the accusation "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." could be accurate, but in this case the "and" between "white and Asian" is literally a lie. I'm honestly impressed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/nyregion/black-students-nyc-high-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/nyregion/black-students-n... Unpaywalled TOR link to the table: https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/interactive/2022/uri/embeddedinteractive/51f080af-02ef-5986-af7e-39d60a817b9d https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2l...