So here's the thing: a student body is more than the sum of its parts, which a lottery ignores.
To use just one example: a lottery could easily wind up admitting 40 violin players and zero bassoon players, or 8 percussionists but not a single oboe player. In which case a viable university orchestra becomes impossible, and every potential orchestra player suffers. (These are not exaggerated either -- for an incoming class of 1,000 students, of which only ~100 have a sufficient orchestra background with the requisite years of practice and want to play, there isn't a lot of margin for error.)
Now repeat ad nauseum for every type of sports team, extracurricular, distribution across majors, etc.
By ensuring there are approximately the right number of every "slots" for each type of applicant, the institution ensures that students have the ability to participate in the types of activities and courses they want to, and that student life is rich both academically and extracurricularly.
There are legitimate problems with some of the "slotting" as practiced today (particularly concerning legacies and in terms of whether a racial/ethnic/national balance should match the nation, the applicant pool, some other balance, or be ignored entirely), but a lottery would throw out the baby with the bathwater, and be a disaster for ensuring the kind of vibrant student life that is a major part of 4-year university experience.
(Obviously this is specific to smaller institutions, whether elite or not -- if your incoming class is 30,000 students then you'll always have enough of everyone.)
Harvard using a true lottery would be a self-inflicted wound. A lot of Harvard's value is because it's Harvard. Harvard lowering their perception/brand/prestige is a lose-lose for themselves and the students/alumni (note: actual students, not prospective students).
Think about it this way: the nature of the game is like investing - it's about Harvard picking winners. Harvard is like the well-known VC that can say they funded <this many> unicorns, and being a part of Harvard means being associated with success. Harvard may take some waivers on higher-risk/less-fortunate students for diversifying investments, but it's only one piece of the portfolio. Selectivity is a key ingredient to their ROI, endowment fund, and social capital. Harvard is a private university and cares about their private equity and capital in a way that is different from public universities.
A lottery is still easily able to be used here - Harvard could publish the slots and the number of people to admit to each of them, and then perform a lottery based on that.
The idea of lotteries is not new. This problem is addressed in most solutions by weighting for factors.
The issue with the current system is that it produces the lack of diversity that you are describing because it optimises for things that only rich people have access to. If you go to a shit school, something that no child really has control over, you won't have extracurriculars, you might not have sports, there are no violins...this upper middle-class idea of "diversity" is weak and decadent.
This presupposes that colleges truly want their admission process to be fair, which they absolutely don't. Then, how would they get to admit legacy students with wealthy parents?
Also, admitting that getting admitted is based on luck directly contradicts the narrative of meritocracy in college admissions, which would decrease the perceived prestige of the school. So yeah, no way would Harvard go for this.
I think that a lottery without a qualification threshold would contradict meritocracy. In contrast, I don't think a threshold-based lottery contradicts meritocracy. Rather it can be interpreted as a claim that meritocracy cannot be properly quantified beyond a certain precision (which in this case is the threshold). Even if you disagree with that premise, it's substantially different than the rejection of meritocracy altogether.
I also don't think it presupposes anything about what colleges want. What colleges want isn't relevant to a claim about what would be more fair. The paper this article is based on doesn't make an argument for how to force or persuade colleges to espouse the system. It only argues that this system is closer to a platonic ideal of admission fairness.
Don't know about Harvard, but I was involved with interviewing candidates for CS admissions at Oxford. Everyone involved that I worked with most definitely wanted to admit the best, most capable students and could not care less about legacy students or wealth.
The institutions in "the West" are really not as bad as some of us would like to think. Furthermore, undermining the public faith in these institutions can serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy - for example, making some brilliant applicants not even try to apply to a good University, believing it is biased against them.
Not only that, it would turns the elite of the country into plebs. We can't have that, can we? Many good jobs in prestigious companies are open first to Ivy League Grads.
"The admissions lottery I envision—which would involve applicants who meet a certain academic threshold—would help universities faced with large numbers of qualified applicants, such as Harvard, admit students in a more equitable way."
The whole point to the modern university application process is they want more axis than academic achievement with which to evaluate prospective students. Did you play and do well in sports? Are you accomplished in any of the arts? Are you a chess master? Did you build a great robot winning several competitions? This is true student diversity, it's not just race and class - and it provides a differentiator between those who just studied and got a perfect SAT score and those with other accomplishments who also happen to have a near-perfect SAT score. The lottery system depicted here is unfair to those students who've gone beyond and accomplished things. We need to recognize accomplishments outside of the classroom are important.
> The lottery system depicted here is unfair to those students who've gone beyond and accomplished things.
Conversely it might take some of the pressure off.
As it stands there's never "enough." With a system that effectively caps you, you get to your lottery tier and can then back off. And considering how much the standards have increased over time to get into a school like this, that may not be a bad thing for mental health.
It's the adage that a metric ceases to be a good measure when it becomes an objective. Students doing x will increase their chance to get admitted at Harvard, parents will force kids to do x to get in, and x ceases to be a measure of extra curricular diversification and being just one more subject in the curriculum.
Any system is going to be unfair to somebody. It could be argued that evaluating students along all these semi-relevant axes like sportsball skills and robot-building is unfair to the people who busted their asses on academic achievement and got perfect SATs. No matter what solution they choose, some group of people will have a legitimate gripe about its fairness.
The article is substantially predicated on a recently published paper[1] which proposes a threshold lottery for university admissions. Among other things, this paper directly kicks off discussion of several basic criticisms that could be levied against lottery-based admission, such as (for example) the definition of fairness.
In particular, note that the definition used in this context is an admission lottery such that, for all applicants at or above an explicit baseline of qualification, each applicant is equi-probable of being admitted. It's also worth noting the author explictly states the system is pragmatic for distinguishing between qualified candidates of increasingly insignificant meritocratic differences; however, it may not be compatible with "general welfare."
Harvard, like many Universities with applications from far more candidates than they can accept, filter applications based on perceived desirability. For example, a student with the same academic background is more likely to get admitted if they come from Wyoming or Maine than New York or California; in the name of having a more diverse student body with more diverse interests and upbringings, rather than just upper-middle-class students from coastal cities.
There is, of course, a racial component to this.
Today, qualified Asian-American applicants are overrepresented as a share of the overall population, due to great academic qualifications.
Harvard has been found to be accepting them at a lower rate than you would expect; if you look into it, there's some "desirability" factor that's bringing them down. Obviously this is very controversial.
"Students for Fair Admissions" was created by Edward Blum, a Neo-Conservative activist and AEI fellow who is well-known for his work against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for attempting to reduce the population-based power of districts by only counting registered voters as persons, and generally recruiting 'victims' of affirmative action to be subjects of test-case lawsuits in order to advance his political beliefs.
I think there was some studies that showed the share of spots that would have went to Asian Americans effectively transferred to white women. In that sense, not sure if Asian Americans were the only "over-represented" demographic segment.
The problem of college admissions seems similar to the problem of selling tickets to a hot event. The free market solution to selling tickets to, say, a Red Sox game is to charge as much as you possible can until people stop buying tickets. But you get a problem. You make the less wealthy fans very unhappy because they have no choice in being able to attend. This has long term consequences. So the Red Sox, for instance, sell tickets for less than what the market would allow. Then you get the mad rush for the first come, first serve ticket sales.
It might not matter as much to the Red Sox but if your event happens to also depend on the participation of the fans then you want to make sure your event isn’t 100% rich people too.
This would destroy their business model which is predicated on getting into Harvard being an "expensive signal" of intelligence, industriousness, and future potential, which is why they will never do it. But I agree with the points in the article!
I agree with the premise of the article in that a lottery for those pass a given threshold is the only truly fair wait to admit students to Harvard. The problem I see though is that really doesn't help the image problem of any of these institutions. Simply put if one of your goals is to ensure a diverse student body, unless you start adding quotas and doing a lottery for specific categories (which is largely problematic in and of itself) you are going to end up with a pretty uniform student body. Certain groups of people will be over represented in the pool you are selecting from and thus while any singular student has an equally likely chance to get in, the overall diversity numbers probably aren't going to be so great. Maybe that's fine if it's the most fair way of selecting students but there's definitely an argument that all you are doing is reinforcing the institutional disadvantages of the non wealthy and minorities.
The author's article is on a question that I considered before. I agree with her that it may make the process more 'fair', however, she fails to consider one consequence of a switch to a lotto based system. Namely:
How Much Should a Harvard Lotto Ticket Cost?[0]
The author mentions that "This system would also alleviate the cost to families associated with students applying to increasing numbers of colleges", but I disagree. If you look at the system in terms of expected value, then what should you pay for that lotto ticket? (Note, I'm quoting a bit from my article, please excuse the laziness)
Assume that you are actually applying to Harvard and they actually confess to using randomness in their admissions. Say that they still require a fee to submit your application. Today that fee is sitting at $75.00. Say that the ‘prestige’ of Harvard remains the same after this hypothetical confession to the use of randomness and that today’s median salary for a Harvard grad stays at ~$85,000.00/year.
The questions then is: Should you apply to Harvard and hope to be a random applicant that gets in at the $75.00 price? Should you place a bet?
After you go through the math and stats for a bit, the conclusion is that the price of a Harvard Lotto ticket should be ~$89,823.00 . That's ~1200:1 on your money. You should absolutely apply to Harvard if they held a lotto, and even if the number of applicants rose ~120,000%.
I go through each of the Ivies and there is an update at the bottom on the top Universities and Liberal Arts schools in the US. Spoiler: CMU is not very 'worth it' (still a steal, all the same) and Carleton and Davidson are very 'worth it' for the admissions price.
In the end: Go to college kids. The ROI is insane.
From a statistical perspective, in a fair random lottery, would not the shape of the probability distribution of attributes of winners necessarily match that of the resulting qualified applicants?
If fairness is defined in this approach as a process that does not add information to the system, and in this case actually removes both information (bias) and noise (bias) equally, all it would serve to do is further obfuscate the cause of being admitted.
For an admissions lottery to be considered "fair," you have to assume the participant selection is fair, and that the functioning of the university itself is indifferent to who it gets. Maybe they should A/B test it, where some are admitted at random and their success compared against the traditional admissions process. Arguably, that's even what "legacy," students provide, a sample independent of the admissions process.
That we're having this discussion at all is a greater indicator of the waning of the university system as meaningful process, and how undergraduate education is subject to Goodhart's Law, where it has ceased to be a useful measure of aptitude, competence, or much at all anymore really.
I don't really follow your first two paragraphs. I don't know about the ultimate utility of this system, but I don't think it exhibits the statistical properties you're saying it does.
In a threshold-based admission lottery, everyone more than k sigma from the mean (for example) is collapsed into the same category, such that information distinguishing them is lost. But the implicit premise to this system is that you can't accurately measure the distinctions between those deviations anyway.
Given that premise, you're not adding noise to the system, though you are removing information. I think the claim under question is that trying to precisely measure people more than k sigma from the mean is intrinsically noisy and prone to spurious correlation with academic success. So then you'd also be removing noise under this system.
So I think your point of contention should be with the premise if you disagree with it, because I don't think we can really argue about statistical properties of the lottery distribution until we first settle on the underlying axioms.
There is a way to settle the fairness of process: re-run admissions process where all data points that indicate demographics are scrubbed (name, ethnic organization memberships, etc). See if the admission rates change.
I've said this before and I've said it again - I'm genuinely not sure about why we invest so much mental anguish about discussing $ELITE_SCHOOL's admissions process at all. If we're talking about opportunity, shouldn't we instead aim to provide opportunity for the 99.9% of people that either can't (me), or didn't go to the same handful of elite universities?
Well, the cynical answer is that the elite schools churn out the people who go into the media, government, and various other halls of power, so a lot of the chatter is actual graduates of these schools discussing their own alma maters, and they've essentially worn down the rest of us into caring. But a slightly less cynical take is that this stuff all trickles down through the rest of the higher education system, because of the aforementioned dispersal of elite university grads into positions of power, so fixing the culture at those elite schools would probably result in positive changes in the institutions they influence.
Harvard doesn't have an admissions problem, they have an image problem that was brought to light by a controversial lawsuit. The institution known as Harvard is basically a massive investment firm that just so happens to run a school -- if Harvard's (and other elite, mega wealthy colleges) stated mission was to promote general education they could open up additional campuses and increase admissions without sacrificing much in the way of educational quality. Even if Harvard was half the school it is today it would still be a fantastic education.
Harvard is trying to have it's cake and eat it too with it's selection process, there are a set amount of priorities they have with each class and need to balance these priorities out, namely: Admit enough legacy / wealthy students to placate the donor class, have a relatively diverse set of kids so that they can claim diversity, grab some kids with "exceptional talent" (maybe a great musician here and there) and pad out the rest with kids that have perfect SAT scores.
I honestly don't think this is a problem that can be solved. Harvard deliberately caps the amount of students they accept and their capacity to accept these students to maintain it's elite reputation, combine that with the fact that their student body needs to reflect the principles they tell the world (diversity more so that absolute quality) and you will have situations like this.
This is not a new idea. It has been generally suspected for years that Harvard selects students by throwing their applications down a flight of stairs and seeing who lands on the right step. As far as I can tell, it's working just fine for them.
I’ve heard that with the size of Harvard’s endowment, it would be trivial to cover the costs of tuition for all students. Pitching random admissions as a cost cutting measure seems unconvincing against this backdrop.
Would it be a problem to remove all identity categories (name/legacy/gender/ethnicity/origin/etc) of applicants and simply admit the most qualified students?
Harvard doesn’t have an admissions problem. It’s a highly successful institution, that has lasted for hundreds of years and is not public.
Meaning - they clearly are doing something correct and are not beholden to what we feel is “fair”. They aren’t doing anything illegal, so there is no problem.
Perhaps it doesn’t jive with some sensibilities, but it’s not their responsibility to cater to anyone’s sensibilities. The institutions purpose is to grow and support its pupils. Then it’s pupils pay dividends back to the institution. Anything counter to that, really doesn’t make sense.
In its hundred of years history, its admission system has been discriminating against minorities, going far beyond what only those with "sensibilities" would care about.
Recently it has been well documented how Asians have a tougher admission than white Americans. Until the 1930s, and possibly longer, they had a Jewish quota. While Jim Crow laws were being dismantled, there was 1 (one) black student in the 1958-class. Then there was the gender quotas.
Harvard - as other private universities - are benefiting from favorable tax treatment, and from society acknowledging their education for a number of different professions (law and medicine are obvious examples). But even without that, society has a legitimate interest in regulating against discrimination in private universities.
> Perhaps it doesn’t jive with some sensibilities, but it’s not their responsibility to cater to anyone’s sensibilities.
Whether or not someone or some organization is successful, for some definition of success, is a very different question of whether they are behaving morally. And yes, the public certainly can and should point out immoral actions by such institutions. There are countless examples of companies and governments that were successful with some policy that was widely regarded as immoral.
I'm pretty sure Harvard benefits from tax breaks on the donations it receives. The tax breaks are on the donor's side, but the economic effect is the same as channeling public money to the institution (it simply takes the form of foregone tax revenue).
"Special status may also be given to increase opportunity for underrepresented groups, in the interest of campus diversity." That's all fine and dandy as long as people still enter by own merit and not to artificially inflate diversity, which seems like an ongoing trend in American academia.
“Increasing opportunities” and “artificially inflating diversity” are effectively two different definitions of the same thing. It may be a good or a bad thing, but we can’t have one without the other.
The college application process screens for more than just measured ability, and forcing colleges to take on people who aren't a good culture fit changes the experience at that college for the worse.
Many of the Ivies admit that they have multiple freshmen classes worth of qualified applicants every year.
The lottery doesn't mean everyone who applies gets the exact same chance. It could choose among the qualified, perhaps using some sort of weighted system.
When I was in high school there were exactly 4 people in the country with perfect SAT scores. Now, according to the article, there are thousands. Maybe they could start there.
And just to stave off the criticisms - yes, they made the test much easier.
A lot of kids take those tests. The fact that there are thousands of perfect scores isn't necessarily a problem as long as the score distribution looks reasonable, right?
The true solution though, would be for people to wake up and realize that in most cases, those so-called "ivy-league" colleges set you up for nothing you couldn't have gotten elsewhere. That you're NOT in-fact better off at 22 with a 150,000$ debt, which you could've avoided by attending a different institute. That the quality of education in "less prestigeous" universities doesn't necessarily "fall" from that of Harvard's.
Edit: Addressing the comments about how it's all about joining that Alumni circle.
I've attended an ivy-league alumni dinner party recently (graduates from multiple "high profile", internationally acknowledged institutes). Save for several senior people with interesting stories, most others were working on their "next Lyft"/"next Airbnb"/"Facebook for %s"/"%s but with AI!" startups. Everybody had a suit and a nice lapel pin to show for it though. Some even wore a bow-tie, no less!
At some point it stops being a club of outstanding members of society, and instead, it becomes a "I took a huge loan to buy my way into this" club. Make of it what you will.
This is a misconception that kind of bugs me. At the top schools they give a tremendous amount of need-based grants (i.e. money that never needs to be paid back). Elite institution grads are not the ones who have debt they can't pay back. Its people at middle of the road private institutions and many other scenarios that have this issue. You are confusing the sticker price with what the bulk of non-rich students actually pay which is far lower. This narrative bugs me because it is just incorrect and focuses on the wrong places as sources of a very real issue.
> would be for people to wake up and realize ... nothing you couldn't have gotten elsewhere
The whole point of this song and dance with Harvard is that the education alone isn't the point of going to Harvard. You can probably learn most of what Harvard teaches from free sources online + youtube lectures.
An exclusive club grants you great networking potential, which is why people want to go, and why Harvard wants to keep strict control over who/how it lets people in. If they didn't exert Quality Control over the network, their primary selling point would be weakened. If you go to Harvard and pay full price with merely the intent of getting an education, you've totally missed the point and they probably don't want you.
Harvard knows this and is uncomfortable saying it out loud, and its also the reason for this ongoing mess.
(If Harvard truly believed that they were giving a world class education and that the education made all the difference and made the world a better place, they'd use their gobs of money to expand and teach more people. This would ruin the exclusivity.)
Is that actually correct? I'm speculating here because I don't have data on hand one way or the other, but I think that college attendance in the Ivy league (and MIT, Stanford, etc) strongly correlates with significantly higher lifetime income.
I agree with you that the quality of education is maybe not worth the price compared to a UC say, but at the highest tiers (say top 10), the network and the name alone will get you pretty far. Also, if you're close to prodigy level in your field, then it's probably worth it to go to the best schools.
The people who are really screwed are those who paid $50k a year for a low-demand major at some private school no one's heard of.
Well, for example prestigious clerk positions are filled from Yale Law and Harward students. If you study law elsewhere, the most ambitious positions are effectively closed. Look at supreme court and see which school are represented.
Ivy league causes people trust you more. There are prestigious places that stock from almost exclusively from those schools.
So yeah, it attracts all those highly ambitious kids for a reason.
Going to college isn't all about "quality of education"; it's also about networking and building connections. Plenty of State Universities provide a high-quality education, but don't offer the same opportunities to build connections to elites, future elites, and their families.
The education isn't anything special. For certain circles, though, the status of an ivy sheepskin is of utmost importance. State U isn't good enough for the silver spoons. Harvard is also not indebting those lucky enough to attend given it's generous scholarships.
crazygringo|7 years ago
To use just one example: a lottery could easily wind up admitting 40 violin players and zero bassoon players, or 8 percussionists but not a single oboe player. In which case a viable university orchestra becomes impossible, and every potential orchestra player suffers. (These are not exaggerated either -- for an incoming class of 1,000 students, of which only ~100 have a sufficient orchestra background with the requisite years of practice and want to play, there isn't a lot of margin for error.)
Now repeat ad nauseum for every type of sports team, extracurricular, distribution across majors, etc.
By ensuring there are approximately the right number of every "slots" for each type of applicant, the institution ensures that students have the ability to participate in the types of activities and courses they want to, and that student life is rich both academically and extracurricularly.
There are legitimate problems with some of the "slotting" as practiced today (particularly concerning legacies and in terms of whether a racial/ethnic/national balance should match the nation, the applicant pool, some other balance, or be ignored entirely), but a lottery would throw out the baby with the bathwater, and be a disaster for ensuring the kind of vibrant student life that is a major part of 4-year university experience.
(Obviously this is specific to smaller institutions, whether elite or not -- if your incoming class is 30,000 students then you'll always have enough of everyone.)
siruncledrew|7 years ago
Think about it this way: the nature of the game is like investing - it's about Harvard picking winners. Harvard is like the well-known VC that can say they funded <this many> unicorns, and being a part of Harvard means being associated with success. Harvard may take some waivers on higher-risk/less-fortunate students for diversifying investments, but it's only one piece of the portfolio. Selectivity is a key ingredient to their ROI, endowment fund, and social capital. Harvard is a private university and cares about their private equity and capital in a way that is different from public universities.
telotortium|7 years ago
subjectHarold|7 years ago
The issue with the current system is that it produces the lack of diversity that you are describing because it optimises for things that only rich people have access to. If you go to a shit school, something that no child really has control over, you won't have extracurriculars, you might not have sports, there are no violins...this upper middle-class idea of "diversity" is weak and decadent.
dannykwells|7 years ago
Also, admitting that getting admitted is based on luck directly contradicts the narrative of meritocracy in college admissions, which would decrease the perceived prestige of the school. So yeah, no way would Harvard go for this.
throwawaymath|7 years ago
I also don't think it presupposes anything about what colleges want. What colleges want isn't relevant to a claim about what would be more fair. The paper this article is based on doesn't make an argument for how to force or persuade colleges to espouse the system. It only argues that this system is closer to a platonic ideal of admission fairness.
agent008t|7 years ago
The institutions in "the West" are really not as bad as some of us would like to think. Furthermore, undermining the public faith in these institutions can serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy - for example, making some brilliant applicants not even try to apply to a good University, believing it is biased against them.
devoply|7 years ago
taylodl|7 years ago
The whole point to the modern university application process is they want more axis than academic achievement with which to evaluate prospective students. Did you play and do well in sports? Are you accomplished in any of the arts? Are you a chess master? Did you build a great robot winning several competitions? This is true student diversity, it's not just race and class - and it provides a differentiator between those who just studied and got a perfect SAT score and those with other accomplishments who also happen to have a near-perfect SAT score. The lottery system depicted here is unfair to those students who've gone beyond and accomplished things. We need to recognize accomplishments outside of the classroom are important.
Someone1234|7 years ago
Conversely it might take some of the pressure off.
As it stands there's never "enough." With a system that effectively caps you, you get to your lottery tier and can then back off. And considering how much the standards have increased over time to get into a school like this, that may not be a bad thing for mental health.
cm2187|7 years ago
ryandrake|7 years ago
karmajunkie|7 years ago
dontreact|7 years ago
throwawaymath|7 years ago
In particular, note that the definition used in this context is an admission lottery such that, for all applicants at or above an explicit baseline of qualification, each applicant is equi-probable of being admitted. It's also worth noting the author explictly states the system is pragmatic for distinguishing between qualified candidates of increasingly insignificant meritocratic differences; however, it may not be compatible with "general welfare."
1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670663?seq=1#page_scan_...
rconti|7 years ago
Harvard, like many Universities with applications from far more candidates than they can accept, filter applications based on perceived desirability. For example, a student with the same academic background is more likely to get admitted if they come from Wyoming or Maine than New York or California; in the name of having a more diverse student body with more diverse interests and upbringings, rather than just upper-middle-class students from coastal cities.
There is, of course, a racial component to this.
Today, qualified Asian-American applicants are overrepresented as a share of the overall population, due to great academic qualifications.
Harvard has been found to be accepting them at a lower rate than you would expect; if you look into it, there's some "desirability" factor that's bringing them down. Obviously this is very controversial.
"Students for Fair Admissions" was created by Edward Blum, a Neo-Conservative activist and AEI fellow who is well-known for his work against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for attempting to reduce the population-based power of districts by only counting registered voters as persons, and generally recruiting 'victims' of affirmative action to be subjects of test-case lawsuits in order to advance his political beliefs.
jhwang5|7 years ago
abnry|7 years ago
chillacy|7 years ago
briandear|7 years ago
leroy_masochist|7 years ago
dcole2929|7 years ago
rheffern|7 years ago
How Much Should a Harvard Lotto Ticket Cost?[0]
The author mentions that "This system would also alleviate the cost to families associated with students applying to increasing numbers of colleges", but I disagree. If you look at the system in terms of expected value, then what should you pay for that lotto ticket? (Note, I'm quoting a bit from my article, please excuse the laziness)
Assume that you are actually applying to Harvard and they actually confess to using randomness in their admissions. Say that they still require a fee to submit your application. Today that fee is sitting at $75.00. Say that the ‘prestige’ of Harvard remains the same after this hypothetical confession to the use of randomness and that today’s median salary for a Harvard grad stays at ~$85,000.00/year.
The questions then is: Should you apply to Harvard and hope to be a random applicant that gets in at the $75.00 price? Should you place a bet?
After you go through the math and stats for a bit, the conclusion is that the price of a Harvard Lotto ticket should be ~$89,823.00 . That's ~1200:1 on your money. You should absolutely apply to Harvard if they held a lotto, and even if the number of applicants rose ~120,000%.
I go through each of the Ivies and there is an update at the bottom on the top Universities and Liberal Arts schools in the US. Spoiler: CMU is not very 'worth it' (still a steal, all the same) and Carleton and Davidson are very 'worth it' for the admissions price.
In the end: Go to college kids. The ROI is insane.
[0] http://heffern.net/rob/index.php/2018/05/18/hello-world/
motohagiography|7 years ago
If fairness is defined in this approach as a process that does not add information to the system, and in this case actually removes both information (bias) and noise (bias) equally, all it would serve to do is further obfuscate the cause of being admitted.
For an admissions lottery to be considered "fair," you have to assume the participant selection is fair, and that the functioning of the university itself is indifferent to who it gets. Maybe they should A/B test it, where some are admitted at random and their success compared against the traditional admissions process. Arguably, that's even what "legacy," students provide, a sample independent of the admissions process.
That we're having this discussion at all is a greater indicator of the waning of the university system as meaningful process, and how undergraduate education is subject to Goodhart's Law, where it has ceased to be a useful measure of aptitude, competence, or much at all anymore really.
throwawaymath|7 years ago
In a threshold-based admission lottery, everyone more than k sigma from the mean (for example) is collapsed into the same category, such that information distinguishing them is lost. But the implicit premise to this system is that you can't accurately measure the distinctions between those deviations anyway.
Given that premise, you're not adding noise to the system, though you are removing information. I think the claim under question is that trying to precisely measure people more than k sigma from the mean is intrinsically noisy and prone to spurious correlation with academic success. So then you'd also be removing noise under this system.
So I think your point of contention should be with the premise if you disagree with it, because I don't think we can really argue about statistical properties of the lottery distribution until we first settle on the underlying axioms.
agent008t|7 years ago
jhwang5|7 years ago
akhilcacharya|7 years ago
trowawee|7 years ago
40acres|7 years ago
Harvard is trying to have it's cake and eat it too with it's selection process, there are a set amount of priorities they have with each class and need to balance these priorities out, namely: Admit enough legacy / wealthy students to placate the donor class, have a relatively diverse set of kids so that they can claim diversity, grab some kids with "exceptional talent" (maybe a great musician here and there) and pad out the rest with kids that have perfect SAT scores.
I honestly don't think this is a problem that can be solved. Harvard deliberately caps the amount of students they accept and their capacity to accept these students to maintain it's elite reputation, combine that with the fact that their student body needs to reflect the principles they tell the world (diversity more so that absolute quality) and you will have situations like this.
auntienomen|7 years ago
dontreact|7 years ago
babyslothzoo|7 years ago
trowawee|7 years ago
lettergram|7 years ago
Meaning - they clearly are doing something correct and are not beholden to what we feel is “fair”. They aren’t doing anything illegal, so there is no problem.
Perhaps it doesn’t jive with some sensibilities, but it’s not their responsibility to cater to anyone’s sensibilities. The institutions purpose is to grow and support its pupils. Then it’s pupils pay dividends back to the institution. Anything counter to that, really doesn’t make sense.
flexie|7 years ago
Recently it has been well documented how Asians have a tougher admission than white Americans. Until the 1930s, and possibly longer, they had a Jewish quota. While Jim Crow laws were being dismantled, there was 1 (one) black student in the 1958-class. Then there was the gender quotas.
Harvard - as other private universities - are benefiting from favorable tax treatment, and from society acknowledging their education for a number of different professions (law and medicine are obvious examples). But even without that, society has a legitimate interest in regulating against discrimination in private universities.
grumdan|7 years ago
Whether or not someone or some organization is successful, for some definition of success, is a very different question of whether they are behaving morally. And yes, the public certainly can and should point out immoral actions by such institutions. There are countless examples of companies and governments that were successful with some policy that was widely regarded as immoral.
criddell|7 years ago
Isn't there an active lawsuit claiming their use of race in the admissions process crosses the line?
isolli|7 years ago
reallydude|7 years ago
Good/Correct as in a self subsidized oligarchy?
pickitupsnake|7 years ago
azthecx|7 years ago
occamrazor|7 years ago
diminoten|7 years ago
The college application process screens for more than just measured ability, and forcing colleges to take on people who aren't a good culture fit changes the experience at that college for the worse.
nradov|7 years ago
albntomat0|7 years ago
The lottery doesn't mean everyone who applies gets the exact same chance. It could choose among the qualified, perhaps using some sort of weighted system.
sfblah|7 years ago
And just to stave off the criticisms - yes, they made the test much easier.
karmajunkie|7 years ago
criddell|7 years ago
A lot of kids take those tests. The fact that there are thousands of perfect scores isn't necessarily a problem as long as the score distribution looks reasonable, right?
uasm|7 years ago
Edit: Addressing the comments about how it's all about joining that Alumni circle.
I've attended an ivy-league alumni dinner party recently (graduates from multiple "high profile", internationally acknowledged institutes). Save for several senior people with interesting stories, most others were working on their "next Lyft"/"next Airbnb"/"Facebook for %s"/"%s but with AI!" startups. Everybody had a suit and a nice lapel pin to show for it though. Some even wore a bow-tie, no less!
At some point it stops being a club of outstanding members of society, and instead, it becomes a "I took a huge loan to buy my way into this" club. Make of it what you will.
Mitchhhs|7 years ago
simonsarris|7 years ago
The whole point of this song and dance with Harvard is that the education alone isn't the point of going to Harvard. You can probably learn most of what Harvard teaches from free sources online + youtube lectures.
An exclusive club grants you great networking potential, which is why people want to go, and why Harvard wants to keep strict control over who/how it lets people in. If they didn't exert Quality Control over the network, their primary selling point would be weakened. If you go to Harvard and pay full price with merely the intent of getting an education, you've totally missed the point and they probably don't want you.
Harvard knows this and is uncomfortable saying it out loud, and its also the reason for this ongoing mess.
(If Harvard truly believed that they were giving a world class education and that the education made all the difference and made the world a better place, they'd use their gobs of money to expand and teach more people. This would ruin the exclusivity.)
throwawaymath|7 years ago
kevinventullo|7 years ago
The people who are really screwed are those who paid $50k a year for a low-demand major at some private school no one's heard of.
watwut|7 years ago
Well, for example prestigious clerk positions are filled from Yale Law and Harward students. If you study law elsewhere, the most ambitious positions are effectively closed. Look at supreme court and see which school are represented.
Ivy league causes people trust you more. There are prestigious places that stock from almost exclusively from those schools.
So yeah, it attracts all those highly ambitious kids for a reason.
del82|7 years ago
kevin_thibedeau|7 years ago
trowawee|7 years ago