[letrowekwel]

Admissions are easy to do right. Just give anyone with a valid educational background (like college/high school completed) a chance to participate in a strictly observed live exam, which is then graded anonymously. 100% fair, leaves no place for discrimination. This is how many countries do it in Europe and it just works.

But what about economically disadvantaged minority groups? That's easy to fix too. Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of opportunities.

Of course all this requires money, which the 1% isn't willing to give. But from anyone else's perspective it's plain stupid that the system first fails to give people of poorer background proper education, and then tries to fix this by discriminating based on ethnicity, which only partially correlates with poverty and bad schooling.

[elteto]

We will never have this because neither side wants it:

Schools do not want it because they lose total control over who they accept. Harvard wants to accept the children of the current ruling class knowing that they will become the next one, and in doing so keeping alive the mythos of Harvard as ruling class incubator.

The other side, which we can call the affirmative action supporters, don't want it either because they see it as a racist by proxy system. And also because it turns out that Asians and Indians (and others too) would do exceedingly well with this system.

[nickff]

>"Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of opportunities."

Many poorer areas already receive extra funding, but their SAT results are still well below those in richer areas with lower school funding. There are many examples of this, and a number of potential causes have been described (including selection bias, rich parents volunteering more, and others). One example of this is the District of Columbia.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/per-pupi...

[HDThoreaun]

What do you put on the exam? Harvard isn't just looking for academic success. They're looking for the next generation of leaders. How do you test for that?

[knelmatek]

IQ is a pretty good proxy for that.

In France, admission to the best higher education institutions, like Ecole Polytechnique, is done through an anonymously-marked written exam with questions about math, physics, etc. Admission is entirely based on how you scored on that exam, with the top N scores guaranteed admission (and the ones below that have to expect some people above to decline for whatever reason, which in the case of Polytechnique is rare, unless they got into something equally prestigious like Ecole Normale Superieure).

This system has produced three Nobel recipients (Becquerel in physics, Tirole and Allais in economics), many famous mathematicians and physicists (Carnot, Cholesky, Chasles, Coriolis, Fresnel, Mandelbrot, Navier, Poisson, Poincare, Thevenin, Lagrange, etc.), three French Presidents (Giscard d'Estaing most recently), many military leaders, astronauts, CEOs, etc. and indeed also Hacker News posterboy Fabrice Bellard (and that's just for one school, Ecole Polytechnique).

It works.