Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants(dailyprincetonian.com) |
Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants(dailyprincetonian.com) |
Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability.
Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
You'd think by now, some sort of Google-like data driven school would've emerged by now for K-12 and higher ed.
How many people do genuinely care about this? People go to top schools in order to improve their life prospects, not necessarily to get the best education (but they get that too anyway).
(I’ll see if I can dig up the research later when I have more time and link to it).
Edit:
"we find that students who attended more selective colleges earned about the same as students of seemingly comparable ability who attended less selective schools. Children from low-income families, however, earned more if they attended selective colleges."
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/117/4/1491/187...
However as a civilization it's important that a school like the one I'm hypothesizing exists because selection bias is not really sustainable, nor does it help those who genuinely want to improve but are otherwise not particularly able.
I also imagine if a "performance school" actually existed its influence would extend far beyond traditional education. It would prove that there's some means in which people can learn optimally. Presumably that mechanism would spread to all industries and we all would be better for it.
> Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new and it's not working. The former view is better. College should be for academically gifted high school graduates.
At the same time, a college degree should not be required to get a good entry-level job.
For example, I had very poor grades in high school (would not have been described as academically gifted) and used state funds to go to undergrad to study science. Ended up just being a late bloomer, graduated summa cum laude with a degree in chemistry and went on to get a PhD in theoretical chemistry. Higher education shouldn't be restricted to just students who appear gifted, but should be available to anyone who wants to put in the work.
I agree that college should not be a requirement for good entry-level jobs, however, I don't think that college admission in general (there will always be elite private institutions) should be heavily restricted based on my personal experience.
Edit due to sibling comment: I did poorly on the math placement test for college as well and had to take remedial math courses. I ended up minoring in math and taking some graduate level courses in numerical analysis during undergrad. So the idea that colleges shouldn't have remedial classes is ridiculous.
I’d argue the idea of college being vocational is not very new. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 was, in part, a way for training people to better integrate into a more industrialized economy.
“to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”
I had a low GPA in high school and a high one in college.
It's not a challenge intellectually, it's a challenge to your work ethic and discipline as well as (very important) social skills, none of which I had in high school.
So, what you're saying is false. Because when you say academically gifted, I picture fast learners or creative minds, not the hardest of the hard workers.
The things you're saying are contradictory. If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students?
* the low performer will be left behind, because the course moves too quickly or sets the bar beyond their abilities
* the class will have to be dumbed down so that the low performer can participate, which means that the high performers haven't realized their full potential
That said, I take your general point about Ivy Leagues and I am curious to know if we can come up with an objective way of comparing them to other schools. As a prerequisite, you would need a way to measure someone's ability before and after admission.
Ability to do what exactly? Your premise is based on this idea of "performance" as if it that is easily measurable or is some innate quality of a person. Performance is a function of the system itself though.
Speaking from the perspective of someone in the United States: I didn't "perform well enough" in middle school and so got ignored by staff and counselors in high school, so then "underperformed" there as well.
I got lucky and had a peer mentor me and help me figure out the importance of education. I went to community college and transferred to a top tier public university and went on to get a Master's degree, and now I am a high earning, tax paying, productive member of society. Could just be another "underperformer", but I lucked out and received someone else's empathy.
We should be seeking to build a system that works for a variety of learner's, a variety of life situations, and a variety of subjects. We certainly have the technology and we understand that it isn't as simple as "high performers" and "low performers".
From my recollection in general what happens is that there's a certain ratio in which low performers and high performers interact. If the ratio is stacked towards high performers in general the low performers end up doing significantly better than they would've if they were in a group consisting of people entirely like them.
This would suggest that societally there's some ratio that's optimal such that we intentionally put in "low performers" as a mechanism to raise their performance. As long as this is done very carefully it simultaneously increases the performance of low performers and maintains the potential of high performers.
Conversely if you have too many low performers and put in a high performer, not only is their potential not met, but it's generally detrimental.
In other words there's a sort of "force" pulling everyone to the mean. The "dilution" that results from adding high or low performers to an otherwise low or high performing group depends on how high or low they are and the group itself. With data this can be optimized such that low performers exceed their potential. Given the rate of change for low performers vastly exceeds high performers inherently, this is the societally optimal outcome.
That being said K-12 education isn't like higher ed is that it's lower level (intellectually).
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108013/chapters/What-...
> Do students differ in talents and achievement? They do. But when those observed differences are reinforced by track placement and grouping practices, and children then internalize those differences, learning opportunities become limited for all but the elite student. The talents of late bloomers go undiscovered, and the rewards of hard work and diligent study are never realized.
> As our school district began its detracking reform, we began to pay attention to our language. Language shapes our thinking and our beliefs. We began with the word "ability" and made a conscious effort to replace it with "achievement." Thus, we write about, study, and talk about students who are lower achievers or higher achievers. Achievement is a measurable construct that describes what a student knows at a given point in time; ability implies an innate quality that cannot change and that limits success. As we made this commitment personally, we shared it with our faculty. Our language began to change, and so did the way we viewed students. Discussions about the labels placed on students and the beliefs they represent can help a faculty that is embarking on a detracking reform question constructs and practices that they have taken for granted. Being conscious of our own language can help us understand how deeply ingrained the culture of student sorting is. Language awareness is also likely to help uncover other justifications for tracking.
> Both students and adults mistake labels such as "gifted," "honors student," "average," "remedial," "LD" and "MMR" for certification of overall ability or worth. These labels teach students that if the school does not identify them as capable in earlier grades, they should not expect to do well later. Everyone without the "gifted" label has the de facto label of "not gifted." The resource classroom is a low status place and students who go there are low status students. The result of all this is that most students have needlessly low self-concepts and schools have low expectations. Few students or teachers can defy those identities and expectations. These labeling effects permeate the entire school and social culture.
Some people are there to just get a piece of paper that shows they graduated from a top school, regardless if their GPA was a A or a C; and that school name on that piece of paper could still open doors a lesser school might not.
It's kind of like FAANG. You could have an engineer with FAANG on their resume who otherwise did relatively unremarkable work. Another person has only no-name companies but has accomplished a lot. Yet the FAANG alumni is the one who will have recruiters and employers groveling to hire them, not the other guy.
Typically kids are learning a series of loosely related concepts that require different skillsets to process. If for one person integrals are intuitive but vectors are not, while for another vectors are intuitive while integrals are not, both would average roughly the same rate of learning, but you are still faced with the same dilemma - either you're slowing down to make sure the one student gets the concept they struggle with at the expense of the one who wasn't struggling or you move ahead quickly at the expense of the straggler. Both students would appear to be equal performers but that doesn't mean it made sense to group them together. While perhaps classes could be designed to have good correlation between concepts, you certainly couldn't do so for a well rounded education - there is absolutely no reason to believe someone who learns mathematical concepts quickly would also pick up literary concepts quickly. There may be small populations who do learn everything quickly and others that learn everything slowly, but certainly the overwhelming majority of the population would fall in-between.
If you talk to the admissions department of every top school, they will all admit that they reject a large number of perfectly capable students.
So why don't they try to expand their programs and increase their acceptance numbers? I can only guess. Scared of change. Politics as well, I imagine. Afraid of not appearing selective, pissing off alumni, that sort of thing. [1]
It's depressing to me how hard it is to get into a top school these days. I bet many of us who went to an amazing school 10-20 years ago would be unable to afford or get into that school today. If you wanted to get into MIT 40-50 years ago, and you were capable, you were pretty much guaranteed a space.
Something has to change, or extreme class divides will just keep on growing, and meritocracy will become a distant memory.
[1]: A notable exception being Georgia Tech's OMSCS program. They basically admit anyone who wants to get in, and offer the program at cost, so 7k for the entire thing. Graduating is another matter entirely - it's very difficult. The goal of the program is specifically to offer a high quality education to anyone who wants it. It's been an interesting experiment, and shows what is possible.
I've been to college, and while there is value there, it's mostly not in the education. Virtually everything important I've learned that is directly applicable to my life and career I either learned in elementary school, learned through experience, or learned myself.
The value in college, at least for me, was its environment, social network, and opportunity network. People underestimate how valuable these things are, and similarly fail to realize just how bad the internet is at all three. Online education is stunningly comprehensive, but the internet is a terrible learning environment, just as it is a terrible social and opportunity environment.
The goal of modern society should be to realize that the qualities which make colleges so good at these things are not fundamentally connected to their curriculum, and can be incorporated into society at large. There is no reason why we couldn't create districts in cities which have the same learning, social, and professional qualities for young people as a university. For certain professions we arguably already do, and that is with literally no coordinated effort to create them.
Imagine if we actually tried.
I work at a school and we are pretty much tapped out for space, so we wouldn't really be able to add more classrooms even if we wanted to.
Princeton spends roughly $270,000 per student (see footnote). I'm sure some of that goes into research as well, but it's a relatively small fraction, since Princeton prides itself as being a teaching university. I suspect that you can build a more successful university by paying students $100,000 a year, hiring grad students to teach, and paying for modest facilities.
(742,123,000/.33)/ 8,374 = 268552 https://profile.princeton.edu/finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University
They do take undergraduate teaching much more seriously than most of their peer institutions--much less instruction is relegated to graduate students. But they hire and promote for research, at least in the departments I'm familiar with.
A) Innovative teacher decides to go out on his own
B) 20 parents like what he has to say and want to enroll their kids
C) Existing tax money pay the per-student rate for the 20 enrolled to participate
D) Program is successful, more parents and students want to enroll. New teachers are hired and trained on the approach, bigger building is leased.
E) Schools that see students departing start to wonder what's going on and hire the teacher to train their staff on his methods so they can see if it can be adopted into the program.
This is how everything should work, but the nature of our mostly centrally controlled schools simply doesn't allow for it.
"Move fast and break things" is great when your worst-case scenario is your parents letting you move in while you clean up after your failed startup. It's got a lot more downside when it's an experiment with the development of real humans.
It's all "selection bias"? Now that's a hot take.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that elite schools exist as some kind of public service to improve the prospects of average, or randomly selected students. They aren't. They are elite schools, in both good and bad senses. You might as well start comparing the luggage compartments of top fuel dragsters with sedans.
I agree that everyone should get opportunities regardless of affordability (ex: international talent), but having non-intelligent agents in control by gaming the system is very dangerous (as seen in politics).
I think ethics matter more in the long run, maybe that should be a factor for university screening. We have too many intelligent people doing harm in the world (ex: ad business)
This is subjective and not a universal truth. I wouldn't want that at all, nor would I consider that ideal. My ideal is keep everything the way it is, just bring other institutions up to the level of ivy leagues (since we're talking ideals and not practical options).
However at the differences at the top 5 or even 10% are marginal at best, and even the top 5% represent a more than magnitude of students than have slots at elite schools.
If you come from a lower income background such as myself college is needed since you need to surround yourself with better people.
Then analyze their careers after college -- this should tell you whether the education of that specific university contributed or not to the student's prospects.
Its not a flawless proposition. But it does mean that those students who spend years and go heavily into debt pursuing higher education wouldn't then be force to compete only for the highest paying jobs that will cover their loans. Upset that the greatest minds in our generation work in advertising? Wondering why more highly education people aren't willing to take teaching positions or devote themselves to societal service? Here's your fix.
Not to mention that as you go lower in rank, yes, there are fewer good students. This is pretty much inherently true (not to say that lower ranked schools don't have good students, which is not true at all, but as a percentage yes it will decrease drastically).
Basketball teams do not pick the shortest, weakest players just so they can prove random internet commenters they are the best at turning regular unfit humans into Michael Jordan. They can just pick Michael Jordan.
I do agree though there is a lot of wasted talent and effort.
Edit: Also exacerbated by more applicants this year, I suppose due to reduced entry requirements, again due to COVID.
Low admittance rate is a plus for most college rankings so institutions are incentivized to engage in efforts to increase the size at the top of the funnel.
Disclaimer: Princeton alumnus.
From the graph in the article, that is also in decline, but not as sharp (except the outlier of this year, which is caused by other factors).
Just like how you never hear people in countries with great broadband access complain about usage caps. That's a purely US (or other country) phenomenon when you have shitty supply of broadband. Increase the supply, competition, and problem solved.
Secondly, a question for those who feel that colleges have a duty to "shape our future generation leaders who should look like the people they represent". Tell me, for all the mental contortions, evaluations, interviews, processes to make flawed judgement calls on whether people "contribute by their diversity" to the student body, how different an outcome does that achieve over just using an objective test, and then admitting everyone above a certain bar?
These colleges receive enough applicants to admit 3-4 classes worth of valedictorians. Yet they seem to think their admissions scrutiny and processes make their classes a much better place than if they had a simpler process. Is that true? Judge people on skill and talent, for every type of academic program a university offers. Simple rules and processes allow people do creative things. Contorted rules and processes incentivize people to do stupid things. Like having 17 year olds compete in an essay contest to see who is the most disadvantaged and worthy therefore of admissions.
I don't think they've tried serious alternatives, yet they believe these complicated admissions systems to be correct. And you look to other countries that have purely exam-based admissions, yet they are not producing classes full of socially inept, non-contributing, non-leaders.
Maybe it's worth a rethink. Or some new kinds of institutions.
A record high number of applications is, of course, an achievement in terms of encouraging those applications.
> There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible
I would be very surprised if they could do this without lowering the standard of the education provided to each student.
If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now.
If I knew a teenager in this situation, I'd emphasize that there is a large "quasi-random" component to admission to these types of school.
What I mean is that the number of incredibly talented applicants _rejected_ by Princeton and Harvard is probably as large as the number of admissions.
I know someone who is _tenured_ in the physics department @ a HYPS school. He was an undergrad (and grad student) @ Harvard. He once told me that if he applied as an undergraduate today, he'd probably have a 50/50 shot at getting in.
While the task is daunting, it’s not quite as bad as you think when well over half of the applications are almost instant rejections.
> If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now.
It’s quality not quantity. So many people miss this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
basically, people educate themselves because it looks good, not because you learn usefull stuff. Thoughts?
I think PG said something similar with respect to the chance of getting accepted to YC. Or maybe it wasn't PG and I'm thinking of this: https://medium.com/@robhunter/your-chances-of-getting-into-y...
For elite colleges that will attract more applications and will have fewer admitted-but-does-not-come applicants, 4% is not that low.
If the marginal cost of an extra application is lowering (say, because we went from typewriting & mailing everything to copy-pasting & online applications), the number of applications per applicant will go up and thus the admission rate will go down.
So my question is, what is the larger context of applicants this year? Has a year of COVID sequestration altered the numbers? Are elite schools admitting fewer students? Has the total number of applications gone up? Is each student sending out more applications? Are kids applying to more elite schools than in years past?
One bare statistic really doesn't tell a useful story.
You essentially study for two years post high-school to take a competitive exam, your ranking in this exam determines where you can go (first place chooses, then the second place gets to pick etc.) You suffer for two years but at the end it's based mostly on merit.
Obviously it's not entirely based on merit as privileged kids have a huge head start but you at least get a chance to catch up during those two years.
1- You learn a lot of useless subjects!! I'm a software engineer now but I studied organic chemistry for two freaking years!! And I don't plan to use that knowledge (most of which I totally forgot) anywhere in the future. Something that I wouldn't have picked if I was studying CS in the US.
2- You're using the same filter for everyone, and people can have different type of intelligence which can go unnoticed via such program.
3- You don't get to chose the thing you love if you don't rank well! Actually you may end up with something that you hate, because that's what's left! And you only know this after you spent two years of your life!
4- It's mostly about hard work and luck!!
5- You get out with almost only theoretical skills in the first two years. A good thing if you're looking to continue in the research track afterword but a bit of disadvantage (compared to people who used those two years to master the required skill for the job market).
Personal interests? Projects? Nope. It's all a waste of time compared to min-maxing points for the admission test.
I'm not American (Canada), and I beat myself up over not applying in the US, because of intangibles like "networking" and "small class sizes". Now I'm glad I didn't, this seems fucked up.
Why haven't they expanded their number of students in proportion to population growth? Why shouldn't their product be available to more people? Yeah, small class size? BS. They've mastered the art of large lectures and small sections.
They enjoy government subsidies: tax exemptions on endowment profits and revenue streams. That's because they're considered educational institutions serving the common good. Maybe those tax exemptions should be scaled back for institutions that don't scale up with population.
So, Ivy League, make like Cal and other public universities: Make it your mission to educate lots of people. Quit bragging about your selectivity.
</rant>
That said, over the long term, the number of Hail Mary applications is most likely the bulk of the gradual increase in applications. There are a very large number of applications to elite schools that effectively zero chance of being accepted, and that number seems to be increasing over time.
To be fair, I do think that the overall quality of admitted student is increasing as well, but the improvements are largely seen in the marginal admits rather than the core admits.
On-campus education is a good that has been underproduced... this is excess demand. Maybe we'll be graduating fewer doctors, nurses, and such than expected over the coming decade
Or maybe there are just a lot more “reach school” applications.
I agree that the overall applicant pool is improving, but it is not improving nearly as much as the admissions numbers alone suggest. The number of applications from applicants who are very unlikely to be admitted are increasing substantially.
The logic being that these universities are essentially providers of a “Veblen Good” (elite, exclusive status in society) and should be taxed as such.
I am curious what kind of students are getting accepted.
One thing I would note is that some schools 'manage' their acceptances in order to keep their yield numbers looking good. That is, they may have determined that your child was overqualified for their school and very unlikely to come. They'd rather reject/wait-list applicants like this because then their yield numbers (percent of accepted students who matriculate) look better.
I’m sorry about your kid’s rejection letter. Larger societal trends aside, that’s not a fun experience.
Two more interesting metrics would be:
* how many applicants admitted actually enroll (and not go to some other college)
* related, bu what is the "rank" of the last admitted applicant: how far do they need to reach to fill their spots?
Can't imagine what it'll look like in two or three years.
This will allow the faculty to teach the upper class courses at an appropriate level in terms of difficulty and level of engagement with students (versus classroom management and handling weak students).
Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated.
Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized.
Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ).
Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... )
Excerpts:
UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
So basically it is better to be a bright student in a dumb school than to be a bright student in a bright school. This is messed up. Students shouldn't have to do these calculations and move to areas with dumb schools to improve their chances. We need to bring back objectivity and predictability back to college admissions.
The academic reputation of these schools is disproportionately from that remainder group.
The rest of the world just has an exam system. Interesting way of comparing the systems.
Yes, we do. We really do.
There are a surprisingly high number of marginal admits at elite schools who slow down the education of the really smart students (at times).
Some of these marginal admits are there for what is deemed a good reason (e.g., recruited athlete), but others are just filling in the class. These folks are what I call “look alikes”, because they all look alike academically/intellectually — they study hard, jump through hoops skillfully, but are largely incapable of individual initiative or independent thought. A very small number of these folks transition into interesting thinkers while at school, but most don’t.
The really smart kids often go into the smart majors that have early hard courses that weed out the weaker students, and these weaker students find themselves in majors that cater to students who are not at the top of the intellectual ladder at their given school.
As a simple example, how many math departments at elite schools are complaining that they have too many really good students such that they can’t handle the load in upper division classes. The answer rounds to zero.
> Contorted rules and processes incentivize people to do stupid things. Like having 17 year olds compete in an essay contest to see who is the most disadvantaged
If you think this is how the vast majority of elite school admits get in, then you are woefully mistaken.
There was a recent article suggesting that Stanford should just replicate itself in multiple states. My own preferred route would be bottom-up: Start by bolstering the community and technical colleges, then the regional public colleges, and finally large state universities.
The "elite" private colleges have a dilemma, which is that they have to basically curate their student populations, because any simplistic admission filter will turn the college into a freak show and destroy its own brand. A college that consists of nothing but valedictorian concertmaster robotic-club-leaders, concentrated in three or four "hot" majors, would even have a hard time retaining faculty.
I propose letting them do exactly that -- a decade of no-holds-barred private college admissions -- and then figure out what we want to do about higher education.
Exclusive educational institutions like Princeton are inherently a scarce good.
That's a weird phrase / way to respond to someone just stating an idea, isn't it?
Who has the most advantages to succeed in that kind of environment? The rich. Because they have the most resources and likely the most well raised and educated kids.
THE FOLLOWING IS MADE UP AND IS NOT ADMISSIONS ADVICE: The consultant says "Harvard, help rebuild a clinic in El Salvador, but Yale, tutor poor kids in Oakland instead, be sure it's Oakland, the admissions committee has never heard of Richmond."
Also geography. I'm sure that Princeton could fill their entire incoming class with students from one or two zip codes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, for example. They don't want to do that, so they must specifically spread out admissions.
Considering the school: Suppose a kid from let's say Gunn High School in Palo Alto, whose parents are a surgeon and a Stanford professor, takes only two AP classes. Hmm, maybe just a doofus who will bust out of Princeton within the first year.
Legacy certainly gives you an advantage, but I think people also discount the fact that if you are the child of an Ivy grad, you are perhaps more likely to go to a top-tier school of your own merits as well.
I say that as an obviously biased Harvard legacy, who also got into other Ivies without legacy, had a 1600 SAT, etc. We never donated anything and I never intend to, we were on financial aid, but my dad did happen to go, and I'm sure it did give me an advantage. I am less sure that there is no chance I would have gotten in without it.
People think legacies are guaranteed admits, and they are not. Legacies get rejected very often (e.g., ~67% at Harvard).
There are many advantages to having a parent who is an alum:
1. Probably smart.
2. Probably knows something about how to get in via academics and extracurriculars.
3. Might be a gifted athlete who was recruited and knows how to share these gifts with their child.
4. Might understand some of the fundamental rigors of an elite education and shares that with their child regardless of where said child actually attends school (interestingly, an elite kid with great pedigree at a shitty school has a huge advantage in admissions).
Add some or all of these things together, and you get a high school kid who will probably have an above average application and should probably get accepted more often than the general population.
While there are some legacy admits who are accepted on the margin and would not have gotten in without being a legacy, I think the number of these folks is relatively small. The overall legacy applicant pool is very strong.
It would really be much better if lots of activities could be decoupled from universities instead of making them mini-nations where people live, find friends, do extracurriculares and everything else.
In the US, this just isn’t the case.
Elite schools produce a lot of elite people because many of the students were already running around in elite circles before they entered the school. They were going to succeed regardless of where they went to school.
Folks from low-SES can achieve wild success through a state school just as much as an elite school. The hard part is putting together the skill set (work habits, study skills, communication skills, social skills, etc.) that leads to wild success when one was not born into it.
Where in the world do you get that idea? I challenge you to provide a good source for the claim that the AA students are either affluent OR politically connected.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976894
Excerpt: "tiny fraction" of low-income black American teenagers who attend private schools "produces about half of low-income black students at Ivy League colleges."
Anecdotally, looking at who attended Ivies where I grew up, this seems to be true.
I think they worry that Black students from actually Black, and often poor, school districts will not jive well with so many silver spoon swallowers. They want people more accustomed to bougie New England & NYC culture.
But I judging how the things are going I am sure this is going to get fixed soon. The colleges will ask you to do a DNA test to determine the purity of your black heritage and a proof of slave ancestors. Hooray, intersectionality.
I guess the hours of training don't count.
> mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos
I'd be curious to see stats on the number of kids of Brazilian/Mexican and Nigerian millionaires (in US dollars).
The sports these sorts of schools focus on are crew, polo, squash - those are designed to help Brahmins [0]
UBI will almost certainly be a necessity, but then the question is who will mop the floors and what is the impetus of progress.
My favorite silver bullet solution for the mounting debt and affordability crisis is to allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, and force colleges and universities to carry some substantial amount (20-30%) of the debt load they force their students to take on.
It has all kinds of negative consequences for admission of at-risk / low-income students at risk-averse institutions, but it does solve some of the game theoretical problems with rising tuition costs.
I would be cautious about schools that do this. Unless its published that SAT score presence didn't affect chances to get in, I would assume its largely a play to get more applicants to reduce acceptance rate, with no scores counting against you heavily.
Anecdata of 1, but in my grad program, standardized test scores were used to sort students best to worst, and then they were evaluated one by one, given an accept/reject rating until all slots were filled. The score didn't affect your chance of being accepted given you were considered at all, but it did determine the chance of being considered.
I suspect it was exacerbated by what social circles you were traveling in.
Without looking, I would guess that that the entering classes of Princeton and other elite schools largely stay fairly steady over time for a variety of reasons.
As for the number of people who apply, this can be increased via outreach programs, marketing, etc.
> But it turns out that the proportional increase for those who grew up poor is much less than for those who did not. College graduates from families with an income below 185 percent of the federal poverty level (the eligibility threshold for the federal assisted lunch program) earn 91 percent more over their careers than high school graduates from the same income group. By comparison, college graduates from families with incomes above 185 percent of the FPL earned 162 percent more over their careers (between the ages of 25 and 62) than those with just a high school diploma:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/02...
This also appears to lack any kind of control, whereas the other study tried to control for the student's abilities.
Apparently college is almost useless for rich white guys but it's progressively more useful if you're not rich, white, or a guy.
Anyway, if applicants opt out of the SAT/ACT they have to submit other evidence of their qualifications.
It's not a good test.
I think the conferral of a degree is supposed to symbolize more than that, though. An institution's degree asserts some minimum level of education broadly, with an emphasis in the field of study you chose.
I don't think the SAT measures a "basic grasp" of English, it measures memorization skill.
But you do need to demonstrate some base level of academic ability.
Part of the issue is that the SAT is not difficult enough to stratify the applicant population, which means that it's not a super useful tool for schools at the very top. The elite liberal arts college I attended liked to brag that they turned away half of the 1600s that applied — and their overall acceptance rate is much higher than H/Y/S.
It would be interesting to think about what would happen if the SAT were more rigorous (or if there were another test that students could take that offered this stratification). Some schools (think Caltech) would probably put a decent amount of weight on such a test. Other schools, who currently optimize for more variables, would presumably not pay much attention.
I would argue this is not quite the problem you make it out to be, because generally speaking, people tend to be strong or weak in a subject overall.
If you're generally good at math, getting tripped up by vectors is not a death knell for pursuing coursework at that level. But there is a massive divide between the ability of someone "generally good" at math and "generally bad" at math. Tests do a really good job of capturing that, actually.
I think K-6 are where we struggle. At least that's my experience.
You can measure it in terms of career success, but even there it's very hard to deal with the selection bias. Those who succeed are those who succeed.
I'm a big fan of Signum University, which is an online-only university dedicated to the soft skills that have to be taught personally, rather than a MOOC. It can't develop connections like Harvard and Stanford but it can develop those skills that make the hard-to-measure differences between those who succeed and those who are merely very good at taking tests. It remains, however, impossible to factor out those connections, which seem to make the biggest difference.
You can measure wealth, but I'm suggesting that wealth outcomes has more to do with your life circumstances than with how much knowledge you acquire in school (by whatever mechanism you would measure that).
Measuring ability is tricky, which is why schools rely on grades for prerequisite courses. As a simple, contrived example: you can't really learn how to add if you don't even know your numbers yet.
I think you're right on about K-12 being lower level is also a massive factor. I coasted through K-12, personally. I know a lot of people who did. But college kicked my ass in a lot of ways. I would argue that for higher education, matching courses to ability is _even more_ important because what you're studying is that much more difficult.
I'm not necessarily against tracking (which is what we're describing) - but when you have a fixed number of resources and a mentality that the best should get more resources all you really end up with is a situation where the poor students are setup to fail.
Grades pretty much exist because we decided that they need to be out of the traditional school system by 20 or so (in most school systems you can only be held back a couple of times). I disagree with grades in general but that's another discussion.
This isn't really a scientific analysis, just basing that on my own lived experience and what I've learned from other people over the years.
I went to an inner city school. Inner city schools here offer fewer honors courses as compared to their suburban counterparts. My experience generally is that people who went to suburban schools are better educated. Suburban schools have higher graduation rates and kids get into college with more college credits than their urban peers.
> I'm not necessarily against tracking (which is what we're describing) - but when you have a fixed number of resources and a mentality that the best should get more resources all you really end up with is a situation where the poor students are setup to fail.
Well yeah, I think we're in complete agreement that some schools just don't have enough resources to do what they need to do. The goal should be for every child to realize their full potential. For some kids, that means you need to move a little slower. For others, that means you need to challenge them.
> Grades pretty much exist because we decided that they need to be out of the traditional school system by 20 or so (in most school systems you can only be held back a couple of times). I disagree with grades in general but that's another discussion.
I dunno, I think they are a useful metric for gauging ability in general terms. Not perfect. But I've yet to really see anything better.
My kids went to a private school for elementary in the middle of the common core dust up in public schools, so before we enrolled them the one of the first questions we asked about was common core.
They told us they were also adopting the approach but that their teachers had been discussing it for years, had a complete transition plan for how to introduce it at each grade level, transition kids based on what they'd been taught at previous grade levels and how to inform parents about what to expect.
The key was that the teachers and admins, through their own professional expertise, were able to research options to improve how they taught and implement them with the blessing of the parents who choose to send their kids to the school. And it went great.
All of the common core horror stories that I've heard, especially around math, were due to horrible execution after the program was essentially forced on everyone. It's a completely different experience when everyone involved decides, "this is the best way and here's how we're going to do it well" vs "everybody has to do it this way now."
Common core was the main driver of choosing a private school for elementary up to at least 4th grade largely because we wanted a consistent learning experience for our kids in their early developmental years. I didn't want risk politics causing disruption in those early years (ideally ever, but early years are where I have my biggest concerns).
This assumes that common core was a good thing, and that the resistance to it was thus incorrect. Which is controversial at best - retrospectives are not generally positive.
> A decade later, scant evidence exists that Common Core produced any significant benefit. One federally funded evaluation actually estimates that the standards had a negative effect on student achievement in both reading and math. Fortunately, the overall impact is quite small.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/04/05/common-c...
> By 2017 — seven years after most states had adopted them — the standards appear to have led to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/4/29/21121004/nearly-a-decade...
A potentially brilliant scientist isn't necessarily the best at memorizing every single idiosyncratic, arcane detail that the professor uses to differentiate an A+ from a B.
I got some pretty darn good grades in undergrad, and whenever I explained to a research PI how the sausage was made they were pretty disgusted by it, because it involves zero intellectual curiosity. Just dissecting and memorizing massive amounts of minute details from the lecture that have zero relevance to the real world. I didn't get those grades because I was the smartest guy in the class (I wasn't by a long-shot), I got them because I was a machine that resided in the same cubicle on the second-floor of the science library 7 days/week. There are plenty of people with lower grades than I got who would be magnificent surgeons or scientists. But, that GPA is a huge gatekeeper to those professions.
For example, the infamous med school STEP 1 exam is going pass/fail next year, because students have stopped caring about learning about how to practice medicine in the real world, and have started grinding thousands of ANKI cards every day to memorize infinite details about weird autosomal recessive diseases that like 4 people on the planet have, and game the test. The curve is tight, and performance on the test has stopped reflecting ability to actually perform the jobs the test is gatekeeping for.
More stable situation at home (so a better study environment) tutoring and, especially for language-based "soft" exams, gravitating in the right social circles will teach someone the "right" culture to reference in his essays...
Please ignore the vast gulf of quality between child jails, if they were gifted students they would have risen to the top anyway.
But it's clear to me that the current system is not for "those who want to learn". College is just what you do after high school because an undergraduate degree is a requirement for some bizarre reason.
3.0 high school GPA 3.0 undergraduate GPA
Now in year 3 of a PhD program. I wasn't even considered academically gifted in undergrad! Yet I think I am a pretty good researcher.
So yeah, study and research are very different.
I've explored a PhD in CS, and reading what people write I've gotten the impression that it is extremely difficult to get into programs.
My point is that having test scores doesn't make this process that much easier for a school like Princeton. They were already down weighting test scores after you scored in a certain range; you still needed to pile on extra curricular and recommendations (and maybe donate a building or two if your parents could afford it).
That math is hard, but at least you know what to expect. And if you prepare properly, you kind of know where you stand. I don't understand how US admission is acceptable: very wishy-washy, essays, extra-curricular activities, references...who decides what matters most? It's by design unfair and unpredictable.
> If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students?
I did not equate "academically gifted high school graduates" with "good people". You did! What an insane idea. It's very clear to me that most jobs do not require a 4 year degree. The fact that we only give good entry-level positions (that aren't manual labor) to college graduates is an absurdity.
College should be for the most promising, academically interested students. Students who have a good shot at a career in academia. Employers won't be able to only hire from that pool because it will be a very small pool.
Why do you think college is a requirement now to begin with? Is it some sort of conspiracy? What I'm describing has already occurred. Sorry, but you're living in a fantasy - the vast majority of people who go to college couldn't care less about working in academia nor would there be room for all of them to be academics to begin with.
The number of good jobs is not a function of the number of college grads. If there are fewer college grads, employers will have to broaden the search. Let high school graduates apply to entry level positions that aren't manual labor.
> Why do you think college is a requirement now to begin with? Is it some sort of conspiracy? What I'm describing has already occurred. Sorry, but you're living in a fantasy - the vast majority of people who go to college couldn't care less about working in academia nor would there be room for all of them to be academics to begin with.
I'm saying that people who are going to college to get a degree so they can get an entry level job should not be in college. They should just be able to apply to those jobs out of high school.
The people left over, the people who actually want to go to college for the sake of knowledge, will be academically talented (or at least interested).
The general pursuit of academic science could be funded by other means. but it will be hard to match the amount of revenue generated from wealthy parents and alumni
Anybody who has been through education has observed that there are the people who "get it" and the people who struggle. And similarly, if you take an expert in some field and have them start explaining concepts to a random person that are at the very edge of the expert's knowledge, said person will be completely lost. This is a real thing we all can relate to.
The idea that "we all can do it" because "we're all equals" is doing a disservice to the kids who struggle. You better prepare them by putting them in courses that are matched to their level and challenge them appropriately.
You can't take someone who weighs 600 lbs, say "okay, go run a marathon" and expect success. Even if that person really wants to suceed. What you can do is train them in a way that is tailored to them, and eventually they may be able to run that marathon.
One idea I agree with is that we should evaluate kids more regularly to see how their abilities change over time. If they show improvement, their coursework should be adjusted accordingly. But all this "not sorting" kids stuff? That's just nonsense.
I've been through education, and my take-away is that it's quite a bit more nuanced than that dichotomy. Get what? Struggle with what?
> The idea that "we all can do it" because "we're all equals" is doing a disservice to the kids who struggle. You better prepare them by putting them in courses that are matched to their level and challenge them appropriately.
Strawman. The idea isn't simply "everyone is equal". The literal first thing I quote mentions differences.
> To be blunt
> But all this "not sorting" kids stuff? That's just nonsense.
Careful not to confuse being blunt with being upset and stubborn! Or maybe you just really like the hat in Harry Potter!
Seems like a bit of a bad faith take here. Of course I didn't mean that there "are kids who are good at school and kids who suck" and that's it. Some kids are really strong in a particular subject. Some kids really struggle in a particular subject.
Growing up, we have all observed peers who are in say, math class, and kids seem to grasp every new concept that is taught intuitively. There are others who seem to struggle with everything. There is also the wide range in between.
> Strawman. The idea isn't simply "everyone is equal". The literal first thing I quote mentions differences.
It does mention differences, and then follows up with something to the effect of "well if we only didn't take note of their differences, and try to give them appropriately challenging coursework, they would do better!" As if to imply that really they're not that different. They are just as capable and the difference is mostly a result of reinforcing their ability by track placement.
It's flowery language. Some people are dumb, some people are geniuses, and most people are just mediocre. It's not fair, but that is the way life is.
> Careful not to confuse being blunt with being upset and stubborn! Or maybe you just really like the hat in Harry Potter!
No need to assume my emotional state here now. No ill-will was intended -- that text just rang my bullshit alarm and was woefully unconvincing to me, that's all. Sorry if I offended you.
Any time somebody writes things that presume to understand the myriad factors in someone's psyche, and how particular words are impacting them or not, need to show up with a mountain of evidence. There are way too many factors at play, and way too little evidence for such a bold claim to stand up to any scrutiny.
Winners tend to win more.
I don't think this is something that is trivially solvable. I suspect (though don't know) that teachers are happier when they have gifted students than not. You'd feel like a success, even if you didn't really need to do much. I imagine teaching spots in honors courses would be coveted.
I have a similar background: undergrad @ middle-of-the-road state school. PhD at HYPS school.
As you would expect, I was a teaching assistant for a couple of undergraduate courses. As such, I got to know many undergrads.
I would occasionally bump into them when they were about to graduate and I was frequently shocked when they told me stuff like, "Yeah. I'm going to Harvard Med" (or some other illustrious program) and I would think to myself, "You were a good student, but I knew undergrads at my state school who were just as good. And Harvard Med didn't even given them an _interview_."
I'm not saying the students were not talented enough to excel @ Harvard Med, but I imagine there is some level of "peace of mind" if these schools favor their own. As the saying goes: Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM stock....
1. I am not sure what you taught and how much access you had to their application/portfolio, but you are probably not seeing some significant part of the picture. “Being a good student” is table stakes for Harvard Med, not an endearing application quality.
2. The student in question almost certainly has some serious research under their belt — Harvard Med can be somewhat snobby about this. Can you say the same about the applicants from your undergrad school who didn’t get an interview?
3. The goal of admitting someone to Harvard Med isn’t having them excel at Harvard Med — it’s having them succeed as significant researchers in the medical field after they graduate from Harvard Med. Do you think that the students from your undergrad could do this? Do you think that they aim to? FWIW, one weakness of a lot of applicants to places like Harvard Med is that they aim too low. If they just want to be a great general physician, Harvard Med is not the place for them.
Fwiw, I do think that there are some students at state schools (esp. good large ones like Texas and Michigan) who would would excel at an elite school doctoral program, MD program, etc. Many of them self-select out for a number of reason (e.g., geography, anti-elitism, path of least resistance, career goals not aligned with elite education, etc.), but some do go and succeed.
That said, the number who think they could succeed is much greater than the number who could and the number who actually do. There are often entire elements of their field that they don’t even comprehend.
I'm not sure I would agree with this. I was a postdoc @ Harvard Med, so I knew a fair number of med students there as well as grad students. I don't want to dismiss your assertion out of hand, but I think the truth is a little murky here.
> Do you think that the students from your undergrad could do this?
In short: yes.
> Do you think that they aim to?
This is a key question and here the answer would often be "no." One key differentiator that I saw between HYPS and my state school is that EVERYONE at the HYPS places was _driven_. They were not looking for occupations where they would 'take orders.' In contrast, many (not all!) of my friends at the state school were roughly as smart as the people I met at the Ivies, but they were not necessarily _driven_. For example, I knew plenty of remarkably intelligent nursing majors at my state school. No one I met at the Ivies would ever consider being a nurse. That being said, I knew several people at my state school who were quite talented and driven pre-meds and the elite schools barely sniffed at them.
Obviously, I didn't know everything about the Ivy undergrads that I taught, but I knew enough of them well enough to have a sense of how talented they were with respect to research (my classmates and I supervised many undergrads doing research).
There is an inherent difficulty in these types of discussions: we are both basing our opinions on small amounts of subjective data.
US college admissions today are basically a joke though, given universities mostly admit upper-middle class kids with perfect grades who can write an essay where they pretend that their life was hard.
There would be no doubt in anybody's mind that we shouldn't take a kid whose mathematical abilities are counting to 10, and adding and subtracting one digit numbers, and toss them into a calculus course.
So given that there is some boundary, that ability is meaningful in _some_ way, we can start to narrow it down. We can think about methods for measuring ability. What knowledge and understanding is required before you can tackle algebra II?
Again, not perfect, but certainly necessary and better than nothing.
I didn’t pursue a bachelors after high school. For a couple reasons I regret this now and tried to apply to a handful of state schools.
One thing that felt very clear to me was that if you don’t fit that archetype, they don’t really want you. I have a feeling they cared more about my high school discipline record than my industry and open source experience.
This ability may vary wildly across subjects (maths vs biology vs history), and with time (acute cases of interest / commitment, or distracting factors like romance or gaming).
In any case, batching people by the level of current ability is helpful. This is a complete opposition to typical public schools, which batch kids by age and zip code. No wonder many of them dislike it and underachieve.
Again, you have kind of a chicken-and-egg problem here. Ability is typically measured by standardized testing, which is a poor proxy. The same way engineering interviews are a poor proxy for actually measuring engineering ability or ability to add value as an SDE.
Unfortunately, measuring ability this way also captures your socioeconomic status, family stability, medical conditions, and many other things that adversely impact your "ability" to perform well on a standardized test.
We could argue it's not on Princeton or other institutions to account for that, but as a society I think we could probably do better in that regard, by offering a variety of solutions to this complex problem.
Just offer different classes, with different difficulties. Some people will be bored and go to more advanced classes, others will struggle and move to less advanced classes.
There's actually a well-organised system that almost does this - primary school! Except that there, people are forcefully grouped by age, when there's really no need for that. That's (one of the reasons) why I advocate for mixed-age education.
Intuitively, I would wager those who receive support from others typically fare better in most ways—whether that is familial relationships, mentorship, or peers. I did a quick search, and depending on how we're defining "success", there are a number of studies.
I was pretty lazy in my UG, and (for the first time in my life) competing against people just as smart as me. So I did pretty badly.
I did demonstrate strong research aptitude in my project, as well as a bunch of other classes. I kinda skipped a bunch of stuff in second year, and second year was 33% of the final grade, so I did pretty crap.
To be fair, I came to the department with a proposal, found my own supervisors and got my own funding (through a government scholarship), so I didn't really cost them much.
My guess is that this “tiny fraction of low income black American teenagers” are mostly, if not entirely, recruited athletes doing a 13th year to fix grades, SAT scores, and (maybe) study skills.
While folks (of any race) from low income areas can theoretically succeed at elite schools via their own initiative, the education at these low income schools does little or nothing to prepare them for an elite education. This is a very significant handicap that many people underestimate the importance of.
That said, in the US, many people (Asians included) can go to shitty schools and still succeed. Their success is despite the formal education they got at a low SES school, not because of it.
Generally when you see elite school success from students from low-SES areas, it is due to substantial intervention at home and/or extracurricular education/tutoring.
You ask why it is a handicap. If they could get quality education during school hours, their extracurricular hours could be used for deeper study or more interesting endeavors (e.g., research projects).
Because it makes their racial stats sound good to affirmative action advocates without actually requiring the effort of educating somebody who is underprivileged? I don't think the reason is a mystery at all.
The mission of Harvard, Princeton, or any university is not to remediate the poor education some kid received in K-12.
I went from my shitty ass physics class to taking one of the hardest freshman physics classes in the country. It is manageable, they are just afraid of cultural inhomogeneity.
There were at least 10 Black kids at my school who could have succeeded at Harvard.
The really bad inner city school systems usually: a. don't have sizable Asian communities
b. Not many Asian students from those schools are accepted either.
Anecdotally, in 4 years at my inner city school district, which had a small, poor Asian population (mostly Vietnamese), only one Asian kid got into an ivy league, and her dad was a professor at a top-tier university.
Agreed. It’s not as clean as that, but I think that it’s directionally correct (at least for this particular thread).
I agree with all of your other points as well.
I would be really curious about why the driven and talented students at the state school didn’t even get a look. I imagine there’s a good reason. Probably something like lack of research, studying under a dud professor (this can sort of be a kiss of death in some fields), studying under a prof with Ivy envy (basically crabs pulling their own back down — strange, but it happens), etc.
Any ideas?
Again most if not all good jobs require skills - skills that must be taught. What is this hypothetical "good job" that requires no training? You're seriously not living in reality, this is 2021, not 1950.
No matter what, if the people with more skills are going to college, employers will make college a requirement, even if a college education is not strictly necessary to do the job. This isn't some hypothetical, it's already happened.
No one is forced to go to college, they do so because the opportunities are there and employers want college educated employees. Conversely, employers need not hire exclusively college graduates, but it turns out that people who don't go to college generally do not perform (of course there are exceptions).
> I'm saying that people who are going to college to get a degree so they can get an entry level job should not be in college. They should just be able to apply to those jobs out of high school.
They already can, they will just likely be rejected.
Calling it a dogwhistle is just trolling. The real racism is from people judging based on race instead of ability.
What you are dismissing as "flowery language" appears to be a different epistemology from yours. I cannot reconcile "there is a wide range in between" with these concrete categories you are giving.
If you believe in these categories wholeheartedly, then it makes sense to figure out the true category a person is in. It is wholly consistent to believe that you cannot ever know with complete certainty the true category someone is in, but that there is some underlying truth. You can imagine measurements that provide information about those categories (no one seriously believes a test could directly detect such a thing, however).
I am confident that I understand the appeal of that worldview. It certainly is tidy (maybe this is the bluntness you speak of)! But I have a different take on education, and the purpose of education. I do not see myself arguing in bad faith. If you can express your worldview without so heavily relying on [ad hoc] dichotomies and categories, then I will respond to that.
> What you are dismissing as "flowery language" appears to be a different epistemology from yours. I cannot reconcile "there is a wide range in between" with these concrete categories you are giving.
Think about it like this: there is a color gradient that transitions from blue on the left, to purple in the middle, to red on the right, smoothly. If I point to the leftmost part of the color gradient and ask people what color it is, they would say "blue". Likewise for the right, they would say "red".
In the middle it gets a little more tricky. If start on the left and move in a touch, most people will probably say blue. Move a bit further and some people might say purple, and others blue (would anybody say red? probably not). Move further and now you're in pretty solid purple consensus territory, though you might get the odd person claiming red or blue. You get what I'm trying to say.
There absolutely are children who are "blue" or "red". There aren't a lot, but they are there. Most are purple, and sometimes you can get a sense for whether they're more bluish-purple or reddish-purple. The analogy isn't perfect, because ability is a multidimensional and complex but I think it applies fairly well if you limit your gauge of "red" or "blue" to particular subject matters.
I agree with your assertion that you can't know _everybody's_ category with complete certainty. There are some whose ability or lack of is very apparent, and others that require a bit more inspection.
> You can imagine measurements that provide information about those categories (no one seriously believes a test could directly detect such a thing, however).
A test is one way to help gauge it. But some people are poor test takers. A test doesn't account for someone not sleeping well the night before, or having recently experienced something traumatic. Tests can't effectively differentiate between rote memorization and real understanding, in a lot of cases. You need a good educator to provide a bit more context if you _really_ want to know.
And that's really what it comes down to. Context is everything here. A letter grade can't really tell you if a student is overwhelmed or unmotivated.
I think, when it comes to grades and tests, the outliers I described above will average out over time. A percentage grade alone is not sufficient to provide good direction for a child's education, but a low grade does a pretty decent job of letting you know that something is going wrong.
It is perfect. Color, as you're using it, is a phenomenon of human perception. Different people have different color categories altogether [1]. Think of it this way, there is no spectrum of EM energy that is red or blue. But you can get a bunch of people to agree on naming some spectra "red" or "blue" based on how they appear. How do you do that? You teach people those categories. That's culture. We uphold these color categories with TV shows, toys, etc. I think there's a lot of use in categories like "red" or "blue". I find relatively less benefit in categories like "genius".
Let's see, you (paraphrasing) say "it's nonsense not to sort students" and also say "most students are purple, so how do we sort them?". It's my turn to be blunt: I see no coherence in what you're saying.
What do you think explains the difference?
> which I've heard is actually very easy once you get in
Very dependent on what classes you take.
The Asians, at least the ones who come to the US, being a far more elite group in terms of genes for academic success.
I call it as I see it, and I'm generally not wrong.