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My personal opinion is that the problem is the elite university system itself. It doesn’t matter how Harvard does admissions. It will always be elitist and can
by api 3y ago
My personal opinion is that the problem is the elite university system itself. It doesn’t matter how Harvard does admissions. It will always be elitist and can never be fair because the number of people who can go to Harvard (and other elite schools) will forever be vastly fewer than the number who could succeed at those schools.
Giving a tiny subset of able and hard working people a magic cookie that opens doors for them is inherently unfair to all the equally able people who don’t get that cookie. It doesn’t matter how you pick the lucky few. It’s not fair and can never be fair.
The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system and stop treating these degrees as somehow superior to those of other good schools because of Ivy League branding.
Of course the elite social networks around these schools are the other reason they are special, and as we have seen in other contexts network effects are remarkably hard to disrupt.
- iLoveOncall 3y agoYou're right, but good luck getting rid of that, even in animals there is a ruling class, it's ingrained in our nature. Force it out of Ivy League schools, it will go somehwere else.
- pessimizer 3y ago> The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system and stop treating these degrees as somehow superior to those of other good schools because of Ivy League branding. Is it the responsibility of elite educational institutions to break up elite social networks? If it is, why wasn't it the responsibility of educational institutions to fix racism or to "celebrate diversity"? How is it "only fair" to force (or convince?) people to think more of degrees they think less of? Should I be forced to buy tickets to movies in genres I don't like because people worked just as hard on them as the movies in genres I do like? Does the state have any interest in the children of PMCs being able to attend the colleges of royalty?
- sdwr 3y agoThat first paragraph hits the nail on the head for me, perfect definition of elitism.
- drdec 3y ago> The only fair thing to do is to get rid of this system Another approach would be to expand the size of the elite institutions to serve all who belong.
- prmph 3y agoIn which case it ceases to be "elite". This is the system working as intended. If you lift up masses of people, how will the class structure be preserved?
- api 3y agoThey’d probably need to be hundreds of times larger. It’d be a lot easier to stop pretending people from other schools can’t be just as good, or even autodidacts from no school. Of course that undermines the price premium these places charge.