I don't think it will really happen, but I can at least hope that this admissions scandal will shine a light on the scam that the "meritocracy" is, and I say this as a Harvard alum.
At any of the most elite universities there are many more qualified applicants than there are spots. For example, Harvard could fill its undergrad ranks with valedictorians alone, twice over. Thus, the fair thing to do would be to either (a) drastically increase the size of the incoming classes, or (b) set a minimum level of objective criteria (e.g. test scores, class standing, etc.) and then just run a lottery from those qualified students.
But instead, the admissions offices at schools run a system much worse than random. It's a system that's highly subject to pay-to-play access (and usually not the outright fraud kind, but more the endow-a-chair kind) while at the same time allowing the universities to keep up the charade that it is all merit based. Even if there weren't undo influence, the current efforts to maintain "diversity" (and not just the racial kind, but the kind where we need 5 cello players and 7 chess club champions, etc) means the admissions criteria is already completely arbitrary if you meet the basic (albeit still tough) academic requirements.
The reason this won't change, though, is the primary purpose of today's elite universities is to maintain social stratification. If universities did the fair thing and had a lottery for all qualified applicants, it would mean they would have to admit that they are not the objective arbiters of "potential" they purport to be.
I thought by "pay-to-play" you were going to point out the other opportunities to use money to perpetuate social stratification. It's not just "endow-a-chair" levels of wealth that improve the odds, it's also:
- Live in a rich metro area? Now you have access to things like internships & research opportunities not available in low-SES areas.
- Parents have high-status jobs? Now you have access to experiences offered by your parents' friends and colleagues, for example, to do research at a local university lab if your parents are professors.
- Don't have to work summers? Now you can take a "finding yourself" trip or volunteer to build housing in Africa or whatever it is these days.
It's much easier to engage in extracurriculars that show how great/community-oriented/socially-conscious/talented at music/sports/research/debate/whatever you are when you grow up in an upper- or upper-middle-class family in a wealthy-enough neighborhood to parents with strong social and professional networks.
This is the social stratification that's perpetuated by elite school admissions processes, it's the top-20%, not the top-1%. It's not any less dangerous, and in fact may be more so -- and the income numbers alone don't tell the full story.
Lastly -- those wealthy enough to endow a chair don't need Harvard to perpetuate social stratification, they will simply inherit enough wealth to do so!
A lottery will never happen as you laid out here. Not because it’s not a good idea but because it tarnishes the pedigree of the school. Being selected to attend Harvard and winning the lottery among those qualified to attend are so vastly different in the mind’s eye that there’s no way they’d take up this system.
Fundamentally, it risks their brand.
I think the real answer may still be the open sourcing of curriculum and teaching through online courses. Completing an education at Harvard should be inherently valuable whether or not you were selected for it. This is meritocratic but also realistic, I think.
> The reason this won't change, though, is the primary purpose of today's elite universities is to maintain social stratification. If universities did the fair thing and had a lottery for all qualified applicants, it would mean they would have to admit that they are not the objective arbiters of "potential" they purport to be.
This is incorrect, and risks imbuing agency to a thing that is really much dumber than that. Nobody is trying to maintain social stratification. The reason for the byzantine admissions system is that the universities are trying to maintain their own stratification. Harvard is Harvard because it's hard to get in, and the people who go to Harvard tend to get high status jobs, like President of the United States. Harvard has the admissions process that it does, precisely because it wants to maintain its own image, and for no other reason.
If they care about helping rich people or educating students, those things are ancillary to the prime directive: maintaining their brand. This is the axis around which all such decisions revolve.
> For example, Harvard could fill its undergrad ranks with valedictorians alone, twice over.
I think this is a valid argument overall but all valedictorians aren't made the same. My alma mater isn't high tier at all (NC State) but a huge chunk of my entry class was valedictorians...from tiny rural high schools with a graduating class of 50 (mine was a suburban high school with a graduating class of 40).
> the primary purpose of today's elite universities is to maintain social stratification
I think that this is their prerogative. But society should change, not the same ~10 universities.
nobody who goes through the process believes it to be a true meritocracy
colleges make it very clear that there are certain factors that weigh heavily. one of the legal factors is race. one of the unspoken factors is having donor parents/alum. now we know that another factor is direct bribes to admissions staff, which one could have guessed was happening under the table already
everyone who applies wants to be in that club with, not the smartest or most “meritful”, but the most powerful families/children (sometimes the same, often not) - and why isn’t family money considered a merit?
many of these colleges are businesses/hedge funds and they are looking to increase their AUM and ROI. I agree that advertising this core business as a meritocracy seeking to educate the brightest is false advertising
It sounds that the admission officers have never tried to backup 40Mb of files onto 1.2M or 720K floppy disks.
It is very easy: just keep increasing the minimum cut off point. If you have N spots and 2xN people met the admission requirements, you simply bump up the admission requirements until for the N spots there are only M candidates where M < N. Now you have (N-M) spots and 2xN-M candidates. So you relax the admission requirements until the spots are filled. If at any point you have more people that fill the requirements than you need to fill you repeat the process for the new N.
Or you could do a tennis tournament ( if you have more than 2x applicants). Randomly pick two applications. Compare them head to head. The winner goes to the next round. The loser goes to the 2nd pile. When the total number of the people in a round is less than the number of the spots, everyone in the round gets accepted. Now we repeat the same path for the second pile, etc.
So the question is what is the feasibility of (a) drastically increase the size of the incoming class in. What happens if Harvard leaned into managed, sustainable growth. At least grow at a rate so that selectivity levels and incoming achievement levels are maintained at historical levels versus getting twice as hard to get in every decade. Why not start a Harvard in Silicon Valley and double the campus and double the power of the Harvard network? That said, I think the key is not to try to double the number of students at an existing campus but instead create a similar physically distinct second campus.
Nothing about this surprises me. Just another thing in the long list of ways that wealthy people are able to keep their wealth, and pass it on to their children.
I had college paid for in full by my parents, and they also were able to provide a good portion of the down payment on my house. My parents aren’t exceptionally wealthy, but they have been able to give my siblings and I a very good head start on life. And if they were wealthier, they would have been able to provide even more advantages to us. The whole system is rigged, and has been for a very long time.
What's stopping you from going full Siddhartha, selling your house/earthly possessions, and giving the wad to the first homeless person you see on your way out of town to live your best ascetic life?
Caring for and providing as much of an advantage to your kids as one is able is a basic human (one could even argue 'mammalian') behavior. I'm disappointed that the narrative is trying to label such hard-coded behavior as everything from 'evil' to 'frowned upon'.
Your comment treads close to the pitfalls of this regressive framework of "privilege".
The default state of nature is open-world. It would be nonsensical for parents to not provide for their children. At what age should parents leave babies outside to fend for themselves? When someone passes away, should their dwelling be bulldozed? These sound nonsensical, precisely because our implicit motive is to build things for subsequent generations. We have gotten to our present state due to the hard work and planning of past generations - "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." and all that.
The "rigged" bit you're referring to is that society itself operates on a closed-world paradigm based around positional goods. The winners of this zero sum game gatekeep their position, extracting work from the losers. Setting up a general race to the bottom will not affect those winning this game, for they will always find a way to mitigate any "corrective" action and keep themselves on top. But buying into the paradigm actually makes it harder for those not on top to escape it!
You should appreciate the advantages you were given, but not view them as some sort of baggage or original sin. I guarantee you the people above you certainly won't.
And as far as general reform, focusing on general "wealth" is simplistic dead-end idea. One must always be looking for ways to make specific facets of society open-world. eg focus on increasing access to education in general and ousting credentialism, not simply trying to make the beneficiaries of the status quo less predictable.
Keeping your wealth is what's good about our society. It makes us want to work hard to pass our wealth on to our children. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
There's also nothing preventing you from creating wealth.
Like laws, forcing you to redistribute the wealth you created to people that didn't. Other than taxes, anyway.
I find the nuance in the reporting to be quite fascinating depending on who the perpetrators are.
When it was rich Chinese international students doing the cheating, most articles would almost always allude to how it was cultural and how it reflects on the general population.
Now that's it's rich American students, the reporting focuses on wealth and class and how it's an isolated incident.
Fraud is rampant in every university. If you locked a class in a room and force them to write a three page in class essay, a good portion will be unable to replicate the quality of their previous written content
>I saw these decisions flipped frequently for students from affluent backgrounds, and rarely for students who’d applied for financial aid.
>Although our school advertised our “holistic” review process, our director typically used test scores to screen applicants. His rationale was that these were “riskier” students. The only time he didn’t? If the student could pay full price to attend our institution, or a “full pay” student.
My main takeaway from this is a reminder on how reliant schools have become on gigantic, bloated tuitions to finance a large part of, if not all, their operations. Whee you need to keep paying for pricey administrators, new dorm buildings, and other likely-not-vital-for-education pieces but your state budgets have been slashed, endowment isn't paying out as much this year, and lower income students don't have access to as many loans - of course schools are going to put a preference for students from a wealthy background.
I think if you want to keep colleges fair, you need to keep their budgets more bare bones and focused on the essentials of schools (teaching and research), OR charge those who can afford the vast tuitions out of pocket with even higher tuitions to offset the payments for more qualified, but less able to pay students.
What is the value of a college education? This is a contentious question that I believe more and more people should be asking, and debating about.
Is the value in the education that one receives, or in the the network that one gains access to? They're really both sides of the same coin: they both represent opportunity.
Ideally, we could have both – just admit all the high-achieving students from upper middle-class backgrounds. When there's no more space, just simply expand: build some dorms, hire a few more professors, etc.
But in reality, where resources are already scarce, schools face a tradeoff: do we admit the bright student from a poorer background, or the wealthier, albeit not as academically-inclined, student? Here, admissions basically become a zero-sum game.
I guess it boils down to an argument of whether intellectual capital is to be more valued, or of social capital.
It is the Ivy League - there is no "turning" about it. Many practices were goal-post moving to keep model minorities out including ridiculously biased vocabulary in test questions like yaucht sailing vocabulary which is covered nowhere in even the most in depth historical or literaty sources.
I would rather hear from an admissions offer from HYP and Stanford, where average admit rate is 5 to 6%. This guy worked for schools whose admit rate ranges from 60 to 75%; so, the target for such schools is different from that for HYP.
I heard exactly the same from a friend who worked in admissions at an ivy league university. Applying for financial aid materially damages your application. Ability to pay is factored in just like test scores. The rich continue to get opportunities poor kids will never have.
It's shocking to read justification of the bribery and fraud in this case as being just a manifestation of the drive to impart advantages to one's offspring.
I have that same drive. I can't imagine living with a morality that would enable me to pay bribes and falsify athletic achievement, or disability. I can't imagine involving my children in federal crimes.
There are lesser unfair practices, such as the ones the admissions officer in the article describes, and these should be fixed, too. But these lesser unfair practices are different from committing federal felonies. Especially when you are in technology entrepreneurial management, investing, or running a major law firm. It makes one wonder how deep the ethical rot goes.
My family was part of that "full pay" segment of the population, at least when I was in school - it makes me wonder if my skew to private college (vs public) acceptances could be part of this, since I was an average student.
In that case you could make it more transparent and outright make it a bidding war over who gets in, rather than the whole charade of test scores and what-not.
TLDR; The admissions are heavily affected if students expressed need for financial aid. The OP worked at two schools, one that had little endowment liberal arts college not requiring SATs. This one doesn't surprise me. The other one is state college with 75% acceptance rate for in-state students. This one doesn't seem like problematic. OP isn't clear which school he/she is accusing of.
Overall, its well known fact that rich people's kid can chose great college as they prefer. Everything from Stanford to Harvard have seats reserved for donors.
I read in an article somewhere that, American system heavily emphasis the brand of an Institution, which is markedly different from European institutions (Is this true?). This brand is valuable to people because they believe that the outcomes in their lives will become markedly different based on it. I think if we can somehow design a system which is indifferent to pedigree of an institution and rather afford opportunity based on individual merit (maybe university blind job admissions at the top companies), then the need to attend prestigious institutions will lessen.
European schools are taxpayer-funded, so students don't have to think as much about 5-figure differences between in-state tuition at a public university and full tuition at a private school.
The "pedigree" of US schools developed because the top schools have gigantic endowments from rich alumni, which allows them to build better facilities, hire top teaching talent and fund research. This is a cycle that is reinforced by alums (many at successful companies) who choose to recruit at those schools, thereby creating a new class of well-paid employees who're in a position to contribute to the endowment down the line.
For some industries like investment banking and finance, it's extremely important to do your undergrad at a "target school", where banks come to campus directly to run info sessions and do preliminary interviews. Otherwise you may not have a real shot unless you do an MBA, this time at a target school.
“75% in-state acceptance, 25% out-of-state” yet out-of-state usually pays double? Are 75% of applicants “affluent”? I’m sorry but a lot of these recent biased articles smell a bit of BS lately...
Already accepted students on first pass are likely not then questioned, so make up majority. The Deny/Check students that are affluent are subsequently 'reviewed' and allowed would be a percentage of the 75%
Half of the bribery scandal was cheating on SATs, so the more you emphasize test scores the more you elicit that kind of behavior.
The College Board and its executives make millions selling test prep materials and running a monopoly over US higher education. There's a good chance we're only beginning to discover the inherent corruption here.
The SAT/ACT is no longer standardized testing. All the determined parents abuse this. They find a sympathetic doctor to diagnose their kid with a nonsense learning disability, then that gets them double the time for the test or more. The test vendor isn't even allowed to disclose this inequality to the colleges; there was a lawsuit over that.
So you may play by the rules, but other students are getting twice the time to complete the test. Some students are more equal than other students.
This pretty much invalidates the whole concept of the test. Unless sanity prevails, the only way for test vendors to fix the problem would be to give an absurd amount of time to everybody.
What a terrible idea. Ignoring the fact that not everyone can take the test for economic or mental health reasons, and the fact that being able to prep for this test effectively skews in favor of wealthier folks, there are so many experiences that shape us. How does learning to overcome adversity because you had to survive homelessness show up in the SAT? How does being raised in a multicultural background? How does music? The arts? Your ability to engage people around you and spark imaginations? Or your inventiveness or compassion?
There are so many types of people I would want to be around in college who might not do great in a standardized test. I'd rather have a rich set of people around with different ideas and experiences than filter down to a single test result.
Here’s a solution. Make college free for all. Anyone with a HS diploma can get in. But, you MUST attend the classes and do the work or you’re kicked out end of semester.
Totally based on merit. No biases on income or anything else.
I selfishly love standardized testing because I have mostly done well on it. but SAT prep is ABSOLUTELY effective. I have my own personal anecdotal experience as well of that of my peers, but there are countless prep courses that boast impressive scores (unless they are lying through false advertising, but I believe it). The price of private tutoring and multiple rounds of simulated live exams is prohibitive and an absolute difference maker.
> Allow people to challenge students on their score forcing them to retake the test, or randomly sample 1% for a retest.
You want to implement a challenge round for the SAT? Over 2 million kids took the SAT last year[1], many of them for the second or third time. Your proposal forces a kid to be required to retest if they're arbitrarily challenged by someone else. Or it uses a lottery to select tributes who will have to retake the exam again.
The SAT is an incredibly stressful part of an incredible stressful stage of life. Kids already take it several times to improve their scores. Your proposal adds even more elements which are out of parents' and kids' control that can potentially wreak havoc on their time and mental health. It's basically the nuclear option of attempts to improve the SAT.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|7 years ago|reply
At any of the most elite universities there are many more qualified applicants than there are spots. For example, Harvard could fill its undergrad ranks with valedictorians alone, twice over. Thus, the fair thing to do would be to either (a) drastically increase the size of the incoming classes, or (b) set a minimum level of objective criteria (e.g. test scores, class standing, etc.) and then just run a lottery from those qualified students.
But instead, the admissions offices at schools run a system much worse than random. It's a system that's highly subject to pay-to-play access (and usually not the outright fraud kind, but more the endow-a-chair kind) while at the same time allowing the universities to keep up the charade that it is all merit based. Even if there weren't undo influence, the current efforts to maintain "diversity" (and not just the racial kind, but the kind where we need 5 cello players and 7 chess club champions, etc) means the admissions criteria is already completely arbitrary if you meet the basic (albeit still tough) academic requirements.
The reason this won't change, though, is the primary purpose of today's elite universities is to maintain social stratification. If universities did the fair thing and had a lottery for all qualified applicants, it would mean they would have to admit that they are not the objective arbiters of "potential" they purport to be.
[+] [-] zamfi|7 years ago|reply
- Live in a rich metro area? Now you have access to things like internships & research opportunities not available in low-SES areas.
- Parents have high-status jobs? Now you have access to experiences offered by your parents' friends and colleagues, for example, to do research at a local university lab if your parents are professors.
- Don't have to work summers? Now you can take a "finding yourself" trip or volunteer to build housing in Africa or whatever it is these days.
It's much easier to engage in extracurriculars that show how great/community-oriented/socially-conscious/talented at music/sports/research/debate/whatever you are when you grow up in an upper- or upper-middle-class family in a wealthy-enough neighborhood to parents with strong social and professional networks.
This is the social stratification that's perpetuated by elite school admissions processes, it's the top-20%, not the top-1%. It's not any less dangerous, and in fact may be more so -- and the income numbers alone don't tell the full story.
Lastly -- those wealthy enough to endow a chair don't need Harvard to perpetuate social stratification, they will simply inherit enough wealth to do so!
[+] [-] ordinaryradical|7 years ago|reply
Fundamentally, it risks their brand.
I think the real answer may still be the open sourcing of curriculum and teaching through online courses. Completing an education at Harvard should be inherently valuable whether or not you were selected for it. This is meritocratic but also realistic, I think.
[+] [-] darawk|7 years ago|reply
This is incorrect, and risks imbuing agency to a thing that is really much dumber than that. Nobody is trying to maintain social stratification. The reason for the byzantine admissions system is that the universities are trying to maintain their own stratification. Harvard is Harvard because it's hard to get in, and the people who go to Harvard tend to get high status jobs, like President of the United States. Harvard has the admissions process that it does, precisely because it wants to maintain its own image, and for no other reason.
If they care about helping rich people or educating students, those things are ancillary to the prime directive: maintaining their brand. This is the axis around which all such decisions revolve.
[+] [-] akhilcacharya|7 years ago|reply
I think this is a valid argument overall but all valedictorians aren't made the same. My alma mater isn't high tier at all (NC State) but a huge chunk of my entry class was valedictorians...from tiny rural high schools with a graduating class of 50 (mine was a suburban high school with a graduating class of 40).
> the primary purpose of today's elite universities is to maintain social stratification
I think that this is their prerogative. But society should change, not the same ~10 universities.
[+] [-] roymurdock|7 years ago|reply
colleges make it very clear that there are certain factors that weigh heavily. one of the legal factors is race. one of the unspoken factors is having donor parents/alum. now we know that another factor is direct bribes to admissions staff, which one could have guessed was happening under the table already
everyone who applies wants to be in that club with, not the smartest or most “meritful”, but the most powerful families/children (sometimes the same, often not) - and why isn’t family money considered a merit?
many of these colleges are businesses/hedge funds and they are looking to increase their AUM and ROI. I agree that advertising this core business as a meritocracy seeking to educate the brightest is false advertising
[+] [-] notyourday|7 years ago|reply
It is very easy: just keep increasing the minimum cut off point. If you have N spots and 2xN people met the admission requirements, you simply bump up the admission requirements until for the N spots there are only M candidates where M < N. Now you have (N-M) spots and 2xN-M candidates. So you relax the admission requirements until the spots are filled. If at any point you have more people that fill the requirements than you need to fill you repeat the process for the new N.
Or you could do a tennis tournament ( if you have more than 2x applicants). Randomly pick two applications. Compare them head to head. The winner goes to the next round. The loser goes to the 2nd pile. When the total number of the people in a round is less than the number of the spots, everyone in the round gets accepted. Now we repeat the same path for the second pile, etc.
[+] [-] somethoughts|7 years ago|reply
Here's how Wharton is using its SF campus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbdxG3kAfCU
[+] [-] cbsks|7 years ago|reply
I had college paid for in full by my parents, and they also were able to provide a good portion of the down payment on my house. My parents aren’t exceptionally wealthy, but they have been able to give my siblings and I a very good head start on life. And if they were wealthier, they would have been able to provide even more advantages to us. The whole system is rigged, and has been for a very long time.
[+] [-] lwhalen|7 years ago|reply
Caring for and providing as much of an advantage to your kids as one is able is a basic human (one could even argue 'mammalian') behavior. I'm disappointed that the narrative is trying to label such hard-coded behavior as everything from 'evil' to 'frowned upon'.
[+] [-] mindslight|7 years ago|reply
The default state of nature is open-world. It would be nonsensical for parents to not provide for their children. At what age should parents leave babies outside to fend for themselves? When someone passes away, should their dwelling be bulldozed? These sound nonsensical, precisely because our implicit motive is to build things for subsequent generations. We have gotten to our present state due to the hard work and planning of past generations - "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." and all that.
The "rigged" bit you're referring to is that society itself operates on a closed-world paradigm based around positional goods. The winners of this zero sum game gatekeep their position, extracting work from the losers. Setting up a general race to the bottom will not affect those winning this game, for they will always find a way to mitigate any "corrective" action and keep themselves on top. But buying into the paradigm actually makes it harder for those not on top to escape it!
You should appreciate the advantages you were given, but not view them as some sort of baggage or original sin. I guarantee you the people above you certainly won't.
And as far as general reform, focusing on general "wealth" is simplistic dead-end idea. One must always be looking for ways to make specific facets of society open-world. eg focus on increasing access to education in general and ousting credentialism, not simply trying to make the beneficiaries of the status quo less predictable.
[+] [-] Kaiyou|7 years ago|reply
There's also nothing preventing you from creating wealth.
Like laws, forcing you to redistribute the wealth you created to people that didn't. Other than taxes, anyway.
[+] [-] ewtddaxd|7 years ago|reply
When it was rich Chinese international students doing the cheating, most articles would almost always allude to how it was cultural and how it reflects on the general population.
Now that's it's rich American students, the reporting focuses on wealth and class and how it's an isolated incident.
[+] [-] atomi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notfromhere|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausbah|7 years ago|reply
>Although our school advertised our “holistic” review process, our director typically used test scores to screen applicants. His rationale was that these were “riskier” students. The only time he didn’t? If the student could pay full price to attend our institution, or a “full pay” student.
My main takeaway from this is a reminder on how reliant schools have become on gigantic, bloated tuitions to finance a large part of, if not all, their operations. Whee you need to keep paying for pricey administrators, new dorm buildings, and other likely-not-vital-for-education pieces but your state budgets have been slashed, endowment isn't paying out as much this year, and lower income students don't have access to as many loans - of course schools are going to put a preference for students from a wealthy background.
I think if you want to keep colleges fair, you need to keep their budgets more bare bones and focused on the essentials of schools (teaching and research), OR charge those who can afford the vast tuitions out of pocket with even higher tuitions to offset the payments for more qualified, but less able to pay students.
[+] [-] bhl|7 years ago|reply
Is the value in the education that one receives, or in the the network that one gains access to? They're really both sides of the same coin: they both represent opportunity.
Ideally, we could have both – just admit all the high-achieving students from upper middle-class backgrounds. When there's no more space, just simply expand: build some dorms, hire a few more professors, etc.
But in reality, where resources are already scarce, schools face a tradeoff: do we admit the bright student from a poorer background, or the wealthier, albeit not as academically-inclined, student? Here, admissions basically become a zero-sum game.
I guess it boils down to an argument of whether intellectual capital is to be more valued, or of social capital.
[+] [-] iliketosleep|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nasrudith|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raincom|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashelmire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|7 years ago|reply
I have that same drive. I can't imagine living with a morality that would enable me to pay bribes and falsify athletic achievement, or disability. I can't imagine involving my children in federal crimes.
There are lesser unfair practices, such as the ones the admissions officer in the article describes, and these should be fixed, too. But these lesser unfair practices are different from committing federal felonies. Especially when you are in technology entrepreneurial management, investing, or running a major law firm. It makes one wonder how deep the ethical rot goes.
[+] [-] forthwall|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3rdgender|7 years ago|reply
Shouldn't we rather at the other end of the ladder, people who can't pay, and see to it that they can get a good education?
[+] [-] jbarberu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sytelus|7 years ago|reply
Overall, its well known fact that rich people's kid can chose great college as they prefer. Everything from Stanford to Harvard have seats reserved for donors.
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strikelaserclaw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
The "pedigree" of US schools developed because the top schools have gigantic endowments from rich alumni, which allows them to build better facilities, hire top teaching talent and fund research. This is a cycle that is reinforced by alums (many at successful companies) who choose to recruit at those schools, thereby creating a new class of well-paid employees who're in a position to contribute to the endowment down the line.
For some industries like investment banking and finance, it's extremely important to do your undergrad at a "target school", where banks come to campus directly to run info sessions and do preliminary interviews. Otherwise you may not have a real shot unless you do an MBA, this time at a target school.
[+] [-] darawk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eanzenberg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headsoup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] test6554|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wycs|7 years ago|reply
To prevent bribery randomly sample 1% for a retest under much stricter security.
If you must, lower standards for protected classes to even out demographics.
Rich people can afford to burn their children’s childhood on the enrichment activities and “volunteer” work Harvard requires.
Standardized testing is by far the most fair way to do this. SAT prep is not that effective and besides SAT prep is now available online for free.
[+] [-] sgustard|7 years ago|reply
The College Board and its executives make millions selling test prep materials and running a monopoly over US higher education. There's a good chance we're only beginning to discover the inherent corruption here.
[+] [-] burfog|7 years ago|reply
So you may play by the rules, but other students are getting twice the time to complete the test. Some students are more equal than other students.
This pretty much invalidates the whole concept of the test. Unless sanity prevails, the only way for test vendors to fix the problem would be to give an absurd amount of time to everybody.
[+] [-] enriquto|7 years ago|reply
As a member of a "protected class" that is able to get very high SAT scores, I would be extremely pissed if that criterion was applied.
[+] [-] grecy|7 years ago|reply
https://www.uac.edu.au/future-applicants/atar
[+] [-] Pfhreak|7 years ago|reply
There are so many types of people I would want to be around in college who might not do great in a standardized test. I'd rather have a rich set of people around with different ideas and experiences than filter down to a single test result.
[+] [-] dpweb|7 years ago|reply
Totally based on merit. No biases on income or anything else.
[+] [-] wpasc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apengwin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mLuby|7 years ago|reply
Since it's not, we could either 1) pick something that is a better predictor, or 2) give up and use a lottery.
[+] [-] throwawaymath|7 years ago|reply
You want to implement a challenge round for the SAT? Over 2 million kids took the SAT last year[1], many of them for the second or third time. Your proposal forces a kid to be required to retest if they're arbitrarily challenged by someone else. Or it uses a lottery to select tributes who will have to retake the exam again.
The SAT is an incredibly stressful part of an incredible stressful stage of life. Kids already take it several times to improve their scores. Your proposal adds even more elements which are out of parents' and kids' control that can potentially wreak havoc on their time and mental health. It's basically the nuclear option of attempts to improve the SAT.
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1. https://reports.collegeboard.org/sat-suite-program-results/c...
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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