Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?(theatlantic.com) |
Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?(theatlantic.com) |
"In short, this decision will probably hurt thousands of Asian American teenagers, backfire for Black, Latino, and low-income students, and make little difference for affluent whites."
Wait a second. If this policy is going to reduce enrollment of non-white and low-income students, and make little difference for affluent whites, then which demographics will see increased enrollment?
Focusing on admission rates sounds nice to a bureaucrat – but to the individual who will drop out, they will be taking the hit on their career and savings– they won't be getting hired, and they will have $100k in debt for nothing.
Who would you hire? A graduate from CSUn or a dropout from UCLA?
it's telling that people rarely talk about SAT correlation with university graduation rates. I'm guessing they are tightly correlated (which is why they've been used for 60 years).
"Wokeness" and CRT are steps back in logical and rational discussion. Sometimes the truth hurts, and instead of plugging our ears, shouting "LALALALALA", and denigrating the purveyors of said truth, we should accept the truth for what it is and look to the underlying causes.
The modern western allopathic medicine treat-the-symptoms-with-drugs school of thought pervades more than just healthcare.
And, since I have no doubt that'll likely occur eventually, what would we use to decide who gets into colleges? Is it going to be a competition on who tells the best story in their essay? Can you even be held accountable for lying in the essay, could you even prove it? What else is there?
SAT and GPA provide significant and independent predictive value for outcomes of interest. See for example the graphs on page 22.
[1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview...
Unfortunately the former is vastly more difficult than the latter. So, while you wait for the school system to catch up, why not stop the system from inflicting some of its worst discriminative damage in the meantime?
...assuming a given school is responsible for 100% of its students' SAT scores. In reality parents are responsible for at least 50% of a kid's performance in school and so even if you put low income students into gold-plated schools they would still underperform because they lack a strong family life outside of school (i.e. educated, non single, motivational parents) that would have prepared them.
Take a truant kid from Baltimore and put them in the finest high school in America and they would still fail because the problem is the family life enabling truancy, not how much money the school has.
...and even then we had standardized testing, and it worked.
You went to elementary school, usually the closest to your house (from about 6/7yo to 14/15, =8 years), and at the end of that, you'd apply to a highschool of your choice (either general "gymnasium", or 3 or 4 year technical, trades, economic etc. school), and then you'd have standardized tests. Your grades in last three years and your test scores would be calculated into points (i think it was 120 points max), high schools would sort the applicants by points, and however many spots were available, that many top students would get accepted and a cuttoff point value was published (everybody above X points got accepted).
In high school it was a bit more complicated, because standardized testing had three core subjects (slovene, math and usually english (1st foreign language)) plus two subjects chosen by the students. Colleges would post requirements in advance - most had just 40% grades, 60% standardized testing, some (i think medicine) required one of the two chosen subjects to be either biology or chemistry (and it was 20% that subject, 40% grades, 40% other subjects), and only a few (art, acting, music) had entrance exams. And the process was the same as before... everybody did the tests, results got calculated into points (i think 0-100), top X got accepted.
The exams included knowledge from all the years of schooling, and tutors were a thing for "bad" students, who couldn't learn enough from the teacher (or didn't listen, did other stuff, failed, and had to get a higher grade, not to fail the whole year). With math, you had to know math... there was a lot of practice in school with every part of math, and tutoring was no better than just doing the work from regular workbooks. With history, well.. you had to memorize a lot of stuff, but you knew that when you chose the subject. There was no way to game the system, because everybody did the same programme.
I have no idea why only america has issues with standardized tests... IMHO, using grades is worse than testing, because an average students with shitty classmates will in general get better grades, than in a class with mostly "geniouses".
Throwing out the SAT is the wrong move.
In the Netherlands we have:
Free choice of high school. I grew up in the poorest neighbourhood of the city and I still went to a very decent high school with classmates from all backgrounds.
More and smaller high schools. More choice and competition between schools. Schools are subsidised based on the amount of students they attract.
High school programs have different difficulty levels. Everyone follows a program that matches their academic ability. If you finish the highest level (VWO) you are generally granted access to all universities. American university application feels like a job interview. You have one chance to impress. Dutch (European) university application is like a 6 year internship where you can proof yourself.
Europe had tracks for things like trade schools / skill based schools and other programs - US is very focused on academics / college / university etc.
How does this work when 25% of the students want to go to the "best" one? Is it really not free choice, but free choice of schools for which your exam scores qualify you?
The kids & parents have generally gotten used to the testing, but the teachers & educators absolutely despise it. You regularly see diatribes on social media against it. The crux of their criticism is that standardized testing emphasizes very niche test-testing skills as opposed to a holistic education.
But overall, I'd tend to agree - standardized tests are a good thing. They help streamline the admission process and make it less painful/variable, which is good thing for society as a whole.
----
[1] Prior to standardized testing, each university in Russia held its own full-on series of admission exams that would take 1 to 2 weeks. Even if you were lucky and lived in a city with several universities, the logistics would limit you to 3 or 4 college applications at most. The "SAT" alleviates this, as most universities now use it as the sole application metric. So you can apply to an unlimited number of schools.
That being said, universities retained the capacity to do their own testing, for example for foreign students who didn't take the SATs. I think elite schools & programs (like a physics program at a top technical college in Moscow) may require additional testing. But overall, the admissions system they have in Russia now seems to closely approximate what you describe for Slovenia.
I used to be quite strongly anti-test because in my opinion, testing well is a skill like any other that can be learned largely independently of what the test is on, and it doesn't transfer outside of a school environment. I've softened that opinion a little because testing well seems to require performing abstract thought under stress, which is probably useful in more situations than I originally thought. Still, while it's useful for categorizing students, I still suspect it has a net negative effect on learning outcomes.
For example, our general high schools ("gymnasiums") have predefined lists of topics, that sudents will learn there, and the standardized tests basically cover everything. How can you prep for eg. derivatives, except by actually learning and doing derivatives?
Empirically, grades are more predictive of college outcomes than test scores. Both are pretty artificial though, and cause various kinds of perverse incentives.
The United States has issues with standardized tests because (1) its black population performs very, very badly on them, while (2) official policy is that the black population should enjoy outcomes such as college admission or job offers that are in line with its share of the total population, not with performance against objective metrics.
Note that communist societies had the analogous problem; whenever they implemented standardized testing, class enemies filled the ranks of top scorers.
Equal opportunity is ok, but equal outcome is really shitty for kids of other groups who work hard and lose their spots due to the color of their skin.
> Note that communist societies had the analogous problem; whenever they implemented standardized testing, class enemies filled the ranks of top scorers.
Meh, we were lucky, we were the "3rd world" (literal definition, before the current one), and our top students left the country and worked in other, western, capitalist countries (and sent money back to their families :)) I think for a huge range of years, our biggest export was the workforce :)
1. Offer all undergrad classes online, without capacity limits , and at a lower price. [1] 2. Degrees are awarded on some tiered scale (instead of the college's name?). 3. All student outcomes are published including % that get a job within 6 months & average starting salary. 4. Most classes can be passed/skipped via an exam of some sort. 5. All amenity/building costs are optional or part of the in-person price.
Certainly lots of students prefer or say they prefer small, physical classes but if the online cost is 1/10 of the physical price then you can prioritize which classes you prefer in person vs online.
The cost breakdown would be like this:
* ~$200 to take the class online or ~$2000 to take it in-person. * ~$50 to just take the exam.
If you take 8/10 classes online and take 1/10 as an exam and 1/10 in-person; then you save ~82% ($3,650 vs $20,000). This puts the cost easily within a summer job.
The tiered scale would probably just be putting the GPA on the degree. (It will never happen but I think it would be good if the degree lacked the school's name and school's would not disclose if the student attend that specific school.)
This would be a drastic change but the current system is extremely biased to the kind of student/person that schools like for their 'culture'. We essentially have an Instagram version of education that's pay-to-play and pay-to-win.
The counter argument is always that college is about network effects that can only be accessed in person. I think this is absurd since a good portion of students don't have the luxury/desire to build those connections. In undergrad, I bet it's less than 5% that benefit (but those 5% benefit a lot). In any case, schools shouldn't be using admission requirements to boost their schools reputation. e.g taking Calc 1 at a Ivy school isn't very impressive besides the fact you are at an Ivy league school.
There are certainly a lot of other issues to resolve. Schools would hate it because they couldn't be prestigious simply because they are very selective and wouldn't be able to spread costs around between colleges/classes. Professors would hate it because they would have to have an online class (which they seem to hate). Etc.
[1] Obviously lab classes cannot be 100% online but in this the student should be mostly free to take the class at any physical school. A titration lab is still just a titration whether it is at MIT or the local community college. Even STEM programs are made up of mostly lecture classes. And obviously there is an upper limit per class/semester but it's probably like 10x the current class size.
The UC system has decreased the white student admissions down to 20%. It varies by school. Asian Americans make up 34% and Latinos are 37% of the UC campuses. It does change by campus, for example, white students are 15% at UC Irvine, and 11% at UC Merced.
Additionally, admittance ratio of universities across the nation is 60% women and 40% men, so that means of that 20% of white students admitted to the UC program, only 8% are white males.
Drop the SATs in order to concentrate on "lived experience", and then squeeze out the remaining white males? Or get it down to 1 or 2%?
A friend of mine, took the most difficult advanced courses at the most challenging high school in all of California, did all kinds of extracurriculars, sports, music, volunteering and never got less than an A in a single class. The very hardest classes. Fluent in several languages. Could not get into a single UC school. Would he have been admitted if he was a POC? I don't know, you tell me.
https://www.hoover.org/research/affirmative-action-around-wo...
https://www.commentary.org/articles/thomas-sowell-2/affirmat...
And of course the Bible on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow...
While the article does offer some rebuttal to that claim, I'd like to give a stronger one*: California is 31% white, University of California students are 25% white - they are underrepresented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California#Stude...
*Edit: On second thought, grardb is correct: Comparing with K-12 demographics, as the article does, is better.
> but out here in the crumbling state of California
Yup, no need to read any more.
> standardized test scores say more about which applicants are likely to earn a degree and to do it in less than eight years; they also correlate strongly with students’ GPA at the university
If a college thinks an SAT is not a good way to judge candidates, maybe tests in general aren't a good way to evaluate their own students.
He’s ignored for the same reason Clarence Thomas is ignored - the juxtaposition between the color of his skin and his words.
Truly a shame...
Not surprisingly, Sowell's article is against affirmative action.
While I was reading it, I was also looking out for anything that might distinguish Sowell as one of "the top 5 intellectuals alive" and saw absolutely nothing. It just seemed like another random article with absolutely nothing special about it.
If there is some evidence that he's so brilliant, it'd be great if someone could point it out.
> But white students are also underrepresented, if only ever so slightly, at the UC: They make up 21 percent of the undergraduate population and 22 percent of K–12 schoolchildren.
If we're talking about college admissions, I think the percentage of white K-12 students is more important than the percentage of white people of any age. Obviously, some people start attending college later in life, but that number isn't high enough to make the demographics of the general population more important than the demographics of K-12 students.
One of these two is a better metric for who will actually pass college courses though.
The only thing that comes to mind is possibly empathy towards the less fortunate, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to result in better life outcomes for a person in our modern society. But let me stress "possibly" because there seems to be plenty of examples of people who dont have any kind of empathy towards others who grew up as poor teenagers.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...
Apparently only black voices with the correct political leanings.
Love him or hate him, I highly recommend the documentary. It's very humanizing.
There is no point earlier than when they get the lower scores. The performance gap is apparent at all ages where performance can be measured at all.
No.
> But why fix then?
It's an ideological commitment, not a reasoned one.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015632217/cornel-west-has-an...
In states with functioning real estate markets, a decent house in a decent location costs $700k tops and you don't pay $3-4k/mo in rent for a shitty, tiny apartment next to a homeless encampment. My friend rents a highrise penthouse in Chicago for the same price as a 1930s 3bd apartment in SF.
Is the housing market in the Bay area really uniquely dysfunctional? High property prices are a result of demand outstripping supply. It's what you get for concentrating the entire tech industry in one place. Similar to Manhattan and the financial industry.
In that regard, the real estate market in the Bay area is basically working as intended. Or am I missing something?
The downside being lack of good sushi restaurants anywhere near, but ones got to make choices.
Organizations like the Hoover love to present this as such, but there is a reason why the departments just 100 or so feet away don't interface with them - and it isn't because they are centrists.
How do I know? I'm one of those students who didn't have stellar high school grades, but I excelled in subject exams --- those subjects were genuinely interesting to me (math, science). I didn't find the rest of high school interesting, and I wasn't a nerd nerd studying anything my parents told me to study. I turned out "ok" (graduated as the top my class in college, then had a successful career in top tech companies). Without that final exam that gave me the opportunity, I probably wouldn't be typing this message today.
I'm not even counted as "diverse" (because I'm not black or hispanic) despite coming from a muslim family and middle eastern background. I can only select "white", though I'm not really white (european).
Today's admission debates and anti-racist treatments are wrong at so many levels, I don't know where to start.
There will always be some controversy over whether any change actually makes it fairer or whether the changes were made to achieve a specific outcome.
Should that even matter for admission purposes?
Sowell has an interesting take on AA and believes it actually does more harm than good because it pits those subject to it against scenarios they have not been prepared to handle and thus in turn results in over-stress, higher rates of failure, and ultimately disillusionment.
It might surprise people who only know California by reputation and assume it is completely full of raging lefties, but affirmative action measures have been pretty soundly rejected by voters many times in the past three decades and the state has not been allowed to implement any of them.
At the end of the day, tests like the ACT/SAT will always privilege people who can afford to spend more time on it. Lots of kids do better because their parents spend thousands on tutoring. Other kids of the same skill level do worse because they work 25 hours a week to help their family make rent. No amount of change in 'access' can overcome that.
Knowledge and skill is complicated and trying to boil it down to a timed test isn't a particularly useful measure.
I grew up in a trailer park, and didn't have access to the test prep industry, so I understand that wealthier kids had a big edge. That being said, nobody is talking about the SAT being biased against poor kids. They are pretending that it's purely a racist, culturally-biased test due to its outcome of having average scores that are hundreds of points lower for certain ethnic groups. And like all hamfisted efforts at "equity", it will benefit the most privileged members of the favored class at the expense of the least privileged members of the disfavored class.
Rich Black kids will gain the most, and poor Asian and White kids will lose the most. Poor Asian kids are already getting screwed. My best friend is the child of dirt poor Cambodian refugees, but the college admissions people treated him as if he was the son of college educated Korean immigrants.
Obama's daughters will never be held back in life, and this ideology makes no room for that fact, or the fact that a pale kid born to a single mom in a trailer park is, statistically, screwed.
Anything related to income will be (statistically speaking) associated with intelligence and other personal traits (perseverance etc). Any of this will be obviously correlated with your kid's SAT --- it's called genetics.
Any other, more sensible data to look at?
This i true, but the effect is small. The studies I've seen mentioned say 50-100 points.
In addition to disability issues you point out, I would expect that there was also a very strong racial/class correlation with that section. I'm from a middle class white family and my parents both went to college and speak "proper" english with minimal slang. I didn't study at all the for the grammar section and just chose the option that sounded right to me and I aced it. I'm sure it was more difficult for people from communities that speak different dialects/vernacular.
1. Take the test the year before they added the essay, so you'd have the "non-essay" exam grade recorded. Even if you were in 9th or 10th grade, that's still useful.
2. Take the test again with the essay. But when you do so, have AP classes worth of "knowing how to write against a graded rubric" experience so that you beat everyone else's writing score. (Thank you AP World History teacher that I've forgotten... I'm pretty sure she taught me how to beat an essay portion on any test)
I'm in the same boat. If it weren't for my SAT scores, most colleges wouldn't take me seriously.
Males are disproportionately incarcerated and killed by police, but nobody is saying police are systemically bigoted towards males, because it's blatantly obvious that males disproportionately commit crimes vs. women. However, the same depth of thought is ignored the minute the discussion turns towards discrepancies where women/Black/etc are on the "losing" end.
At the end of the day, the ideology is shallow, and equates to something very similar that emerged in the waning days of the Weimar Republic:
Group X (German Jews) has more on average than Group Y (German Gentiles), and this must be because those with more are rigging the system and taking from Group Y. They ignored the cultural differences that make Ashkenazi Jews vastly more successful than other ethnic groups wherever they go, because that would have forced German gentiles to look inward, rather than externalizing blame.
I grew up in a mostly Black county, and didn't sit in a classroom where I wasn't in the minority until I left to college. By all definitions, my mostly Black school was underfunded and fit the narrative of "systemic racism". But this ideology makes no allowances for the non-Black students who attended my school. Was I a victim of systemic racism because I attended the same schools? I lived in a trailer park, and my family's income put us squarely below the federal poverty line. But this ideology makes race the primary and essential reason for all things bad in the world, ignoring the complexity of life that emerges when viewing it at high resolution. Like all fundamentalist ideologues/religions, it constructs a low-resolution narrative, and places blame for all bad things in the world on a nebulous superstructure (Satan, White Supremacy). And predictably, it is filled with clerics who desperately try to blow up any incident into evidence that the nebulous superstructue "great evil" is far more prevalent than it really is. In the 80's it was devil worshippers, and today it's "White supremacists". The desperation is readily apparent in attempts to frame a wave of anti-Asian violence that was primarily perpetrated by young Black men into a narrative of newly ascendant White supremacy.
The worst part of this ideology to me has been it's utterly US-centric focus, where things like objective testing, education, and work ethic have been labelled as "White", ignoring the numerous cultures throughout the world, such as your Middle Eastern ancestors or China, who were conducting Civil Service entrance exams while my ancestors in northern Europe were running around the woods with bows and arrows chopping each other's heads off.
The biggest element of White privilege that I possess is not having a tiny group of useless, whiny, unelected activists get put on a pedestal by corporate media as personifying and representing my views on the world. Al Sharpton doesn't speak for Black Americans, and was never elected to do so. BLM doesn't speak for them either. They only claim to do so, and are convenient tools for White elites to shift the conversation from discussions on economic class to purely race. For an ideology based in Marxism, it's amazing how much it undermines the ability to organize unions. After all, Jeff Bezos just had to make s few donations here and there, put a few words on his website, and was let off scot free by the media for his awful treatment of workers and aggressive union busting.
For an ideology based in Marxism, it's amazing how much it undermines the ability to organize unions
(sorry, im a little rusty on this subject)
UC doesn’t control access to the SAT, it does control whether it uses the SAT. Not using it in its current form is the strongest influence it has to incentivize change.
As a Californian I find it quite ironic that many policies in “conservative” Texas (ex. university admissions, property tax, income tax) are more much more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California.
If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT admission policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases) then I would be curious to hear.
Gaming GPA is much easier for privileged kids. My wife and I carefully manage her younger step siblings’ course schedules to maximize GPA. We schedule meetings with professors, counselors, schedule retakes and extra credit, etc. I can’t imagine how it would be easier for a kid with an unstable home life, who is moving around, maybe has parents getting divorced, etc., to keep up their GPA over several years than to do well on one test.
I did average on my SAT compared to my ex-gf in college (top 30 US school) but I ran a 3.8 in college compared to her being a C student.
Doesn't matter anyway because none of the stuff I learned in college is used in my daily job as a java developer.
-- Private schools can curve more leniently so its pay to play
-- Rich schools tend to have more AP/Honor courses which inflate weighted GPAs
I went to one of the best public schools in America and it was not uncommon for someone to take 100% AP/Honors and get a 4.5+ GPA.
That's the first myth.
California has what's probably the best community college system in America. It was very easy for me, as a poor kid to meet ( and at times date) people from all over the world. Maybe you dropped out of high school due to just not liking it. You can still attend a community college, transfer to a UC and have a great career.
I did very poorly in highschool since I was constantly ether getting kicked out or evicted. Still I had morons in my family pressuring me to shrug it off.
If anything I'm angrier now than I was back then
I was exceptionally lucky to be able to find an affordable place to live at 19. My family is pretty horrible, all I really needed was a stable place. But that's impossible now, the same apartment that used to be $600 is now $1,300 or 1400.
For the record I've had several Asian friends who come from similar backgrounds, where there's extreme domestic violence at home and they just need a stable place to live. This is very much not a race issue, it's a 'people who don't have stable households aren't going to be able to get into top schools' issue.
If you want to fix test scores or whatever, you need to look at actually fixing the economic situation many of these kids are in.
Make it possible to afford your own place with a full time minimum wage job. At least then when a kid from a messed up family turns 18 they can move out.
Seriously, you can’t justify a wealthier neighborhood being entitled to better schools when they’re public institutions receiving state and federal funds. Evening out this funding is the only real step to giving students a more equitable future, but nobody would dare try it and put their own school district’s budget in jeopardy!
They want to fix the problem? Create an executive order requiring that all public schools who receive federal funding must have a percentage of their local funds be distributed at a state level, inversely to the funds generated locally.
My best friend growing up was Korean. I saw firsthand the amount of effort he put into his studies. Why should we allow any institution to invalidate his work because our culture produces lazier, dumber students? Why should we artificially prop up patterns of thought and behavior that have negative effects on the people subjected to it?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Ivy#Original_list_publi...
It's how communist countries allocate admissions and jobs, what mattered most was not merit, but collusion to the party. So there was no reason to try to be very good in any field.
This is partly because of the yield rate of Asian students. This refers to the rate that admitted students choose to attend UC.
White, Black, and Hispanic students all choose to attend UCs at less than 40%. The yield rate for Asian students is 48%.
If Asians had the same yield rate as the other racial groups, their share of UC enrollment would drop from 37% to 31%. This is pretty close to their share of the UC applicant pool, 28%.
This comes from the most recent data available, from 2020. [1]
1: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions...
Do you think they’re pulling random kids off the street and shoving them into Harvard? Even the lowest achieving students admitted to elite schools were at absolute minimum inside the nation’s top quartile.
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.
This bears out in what I've observed (all anecdotes ofc). Many people who go from these sorts of large south bay high schools to top-5 UCs are head and shoulders smarter than the graduates of the small private school => Ivy League pathway, despite the Ivy schools ranking better.
When you see it in action (brilliant kid who went to a large, highly competitive public high school who was rejected from every Ivy, and is way smarter than many students who went to the schools that rejected them), it feels rotten. Happily most of the folks I've met in this category have great careers but their confidence often takes a hit at the age of 17-18.
If you could “just” fix all systematic disadvantages then we wouldn’t even be talking about college admissions.
Of course, the people who have decided to drop these tests claim to want some sort of demographic change. As long as California public universities have a limited number of open seats, that will hurt some groups if it helps others. Personally I hope that this doesn't just turn into helping whites at the expense of Asians, but that isn't impossible.
Applications: https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/co...
Admissions: https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/co...
System-wide, any demographic change looks insignificant. No change at Berkeley (which had already increased SES weighing in 2020). UCLA slightly boosted URG, but it looks like some of that might have been application demographic changes (which removing the SAT might have caused to some degree - a small number of students may be discouraged by it)
They should keep the test, but use a threshold (per major and school) with a lottery for everyone above the threshold. And admit a small number below at random to keep evaluating what the threshold should be.
America is a failed state, the majority of Americans just don't know it yet. The founding mythos, and ideological bedrock of America has been replaced by something toxic and subversive. The ideological upheaval of the last few years has left behind a broken and confused country. One that will inevitably fracture into smaller parts, or devolve unequivocally into a mess like South Africa. If you go to the former USSR (for one example), you can see monuments to the country's tenacity in the face of absolute peril. Statues, monuments, and architecture which proudly memorialise their heroes, and their history. Meanwhile, delinquents in America have been tearing down any statue or monument with a European-sounding name. America will end up a country with no history, and no future.
The history of the US is a history of European oppression. The delinquents you're talking about are the ones who actually want to tell the history as it actually was and not memorialize people who actively mistreated (which is generous phrasing) the descendants of the Americans who live here. In some way I'm sympathetic that we're all collectively "meeting our heroes" and it's not great but it's the truth.
Issues with this particular article (addressed by above):
* It's ignoring the racial gap in SAT scores (and other standardized tests) that exists even after controlling for family income. A large part of the political narrative here (including the university backing Prop 16 which would allow it to consider race) is coming from this fact, not just the income gap in itself (Note that I don't think the university ever took the position that the tests were per se discriminatory, which the author claims).
* It's not really defining what "worst" school means; you need to be careful here as you might just be saying the tautological "students at schools with low-performing students on average on low performing". It's making the common claim these schools are underfunded, but on average, lower performing schools are receiving more money. (Example from LA - http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php -- LAUSD, which some of the lowest ranking schools, is well over average funding - areas with top schools - e.g. Arcadia - get the least). Perhaps the author means "underfunded schools relative to what I think they should get", but that's a different statement.
* UC admission data for 2021 is out (https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/co...), so it's possible to start objectively assessing the impact of the policy.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/Judge-bars-Uni...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/UC-settles-student...
The article very clearly references the lawsuit: "Do the tests prevent low-income Black and Latino students from getting college degrees? This is the charge of a lawsuit filed in 2019 and settled by the university in May"
I didn't even know AP classes EXISTED. I got to go home for a work study after my first class senior year because I had taken all of the classes available to me. A lot of my peers weren't so lucky and had to sit in study hall for the entire day. The school was gaming attendance because kids in seats means more money, and with how small the school was every student mattered.
Either way: Not a great place to be as a reasonably intelligent young person with an aptitude for technology. I was so profoundly unprepared for college, I had to work twice as hard to do half the work as everyone else, but I managed to sneak by with never failing a class. ( OK, I failed one statistics class because I walked into the final without a calculator. )
I had to work during the day to support myself and do night classes my Jr and Sr year of school. I have this memory of all of my classmates going to an "Of Montreal" concert, and I really wanted to go, but I didn't have the money to buy the ticket. Or the time, I never went out, I had to spend my free time on the weekends doing my homework.
So yeah, this is a nice gesture. The SAT is easier to study for when you are a product of an achievement driven environment and have mentors to coach you through the process. College is more valuable when you actually have the time and capacity to take advantage of your education and it's opportunities. Same as everything else, there is a massive gulf of education and training between students of wealthy districts, and the rest of us. Personally, I think those of us from the sandlot deserve a swing as well.
So you could go to a crappy school, but could show you had a reasonable chance to do well in college and test into the UC system from almost anywhere.
Not very study-able: https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
The system of "holistic reviews" and unpredictability was introduced to control the number of Jewish people being admitted to top universities. More here: https://circles.page/5680a56b5c28af0998656e09/College-Admiss...
At my high school most people didn't apply to more than 3 schools (1 or 2 less selective state schools + 1 flagship). I only applied to 4 and only actually had a chance at the two I got into. The undergrad I graduated from didn't require an essay or anything, just SAT scores and GPA. Even my flagship university - a public Ivy - effectively just judges in-state applicants using a GPA/SAT grid system.
I'm not alone in this, my university has about 40,000 students enrolled today.
We live in an age where university level lectures and materials are available for free. Why are we paying a ton of money to obtain a limited slot that allows us to show up at a building for the same lectures and materials?
Is it personal attention? Almost certainly not, but even if it was that can be had on the open market for far less cost.
Access to specialized equipment? Well maybe, but surely there's a more efficient solution there.
Is it certification? Because in my experience, as well as that of many others, the degrees don't say much of anything about competence so what good are they? Besides, it's again a really expensive way to certify people and surely there must be a better method.
1. You legitimately want to expand human knowledge beyond what exists. This should be the ultimate goal of a PHD. Whether or not this produces important output (in the capitalistic sense, aka is profitable) is secondary to attaining the new knowledge.
2. You want to attain high level knowledge of a subject AND the best way you learn is by having a strict course regiment with a decent teacher-to-student ratio.
3. You just want that check mark on your resume when you try to get a job.
#1 isn't about getting a job. #2 and #3 have some overlap in that the ultimate goal of both tends to be securing a job. The difference between them is how an individual learns material. Some people can read a book, or view youtube lectures, then take some tests and learn sufficiently that way (#3). But some people require #2 style learning.
But let's be honest, the vast majority of people attending college are for #2 or #3. Meaning, it is ultimately about getting a job. So as long as a job in a desired fields requires a degree, people will essentially be required to get them. The trend is recent years seems to be the dramatic split between #2 and #3 style learning.
My experience was that the system worked just fine for all kinds of people that got to the point that they wanted to go to a UC.
Among my siblings and our offspring family of 12, we put 6 of family members through the UC system (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD). 3 went through the community college system with no reliance on standardized test scores. 2 took SATs and GPAs. 1 got in this fall on GPA alone.
So, fun thing about the actual study that the author references... the committee actually __DIDN'T__ tell UC regents to not get rid of the test; they recommended against making it test optional due to variability in assessment requirements between institutions - and the exec summary doesn't include any recommendation for or against fully excising standardized testing from their eval process.
Further, the committee found that while the tests over HSGPA (high test score, low GPA) weighting was used in a subset of cases it was more likely that a student was admitted with just the opposite (low test score, high GPA); and overall it looks like the strongest recommendation was to disincentivize the HSGPA due to it losing almost 25% predictive effectiveness over the tested time period.
This article reads fine until it gets to the last couple of paragraphs, covering "affirmative action" and over-representation of AAPI students; and this is where a glaring issue comes through with their analysis. Like any higher ed institution there is a monetary incentive to get international students; as there isn't usually an out for lower tuition like WUE/WGE (which coincidentally the UC system no longer participates in), interstate compact agreements, and the like for tuition reduction; and the home country in many cases subsidizes the student so the higher ed institution gets full out-of-state tuition rates on a nearly guaranteed basis. So, by using AAPI students as a proxy argument for their weird screed at the end while leaving off factors like what percentage of that UG population is in-state v. out-of-state v. international does a disservice to that over/under-represented claim; while also leaving them off of the earlier analysis pieces moves the slant of the article in a weird way.
For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them; so by not mentioning them until you reach the point you're calling out the discrepancy they end up begging the question around the "model minority" bs; when it really may be explained more concretely through international and out of state student draw.
This is especially true for people with money: either through major editing from professionals ($$$), or just outright paying someone to write them for you ($$$). As someone who went to a rich high school in a large city (as a diversity student), I can tell you the number of students I knew who paid to have their essays written or heavily edited outnumbered those who didn't.
The competition for the best schooling so that you can get the best job can indeed yield significant benefits for the winners. The private sector judges prestigious universities to be high-value; those universities use SATs to judge which students are high-value; and students judge universities as high-value based on their perception of what the private sector values.
All of this is apparently a filtration system designed to find the best and brightest candidates. Presumably, as many have mentioned, these are people with high IQ. And indeed, high IQ people are extremely noticeable when you are around them. They are frequently faster, more incisive, and have a knowledge base that is both deep and wide.
...And many of them are unproductive, valueless fuck-ups with poor temperaments for almost any work requiring a social component (i.e. almost all work). They have substance abuse problems. They have personality disorders. They lie. And many of them are also wonderful people.
I'll take a medium-bright, tenacious, responsible worker with a degree from a state school or community college any day of the week over some moneyed primadonna who is too busy trying to display their own cleverness to focus on the task at hand.
All of this judgement is stupid because it discounts character. Medium aptitude coupled with hard work can and does produce excellence. Focus, care, and attention to detail are at least as important as intelligence. The filtration process closes doors for these people.
Lastly, though this only an anecdote, anyone who's worked in the professional world has had the pleasure of running into idiot attorneys from prestigious schools. People who send e-mails full of misspellings, careless factual errors, and incorrect legal assertions beyond their specific scope of legal knowledge. Trust me, these people exist, and it's extremely difficult to explain how they exist if the filtration system is really the meritocracy it claims to be. It is frequently hacked as a vehicle for privilege.
The reason this exists is that it's effectively an affirmative action program for both urban segregated schools and rural schools, which combined have enough political power to pull this off. I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this to be constructed - note that suburbs in general fight against such policies.
UT itself generally doesn't like the state mandated policy because it results in a less academically strong cohort than other flagship universities, reducing its rank.
Whether one school's admission program is "better" or not depends on what you view as the purpose of universities (something often lost in these conversations). Are you weighing more academically similar cohort (in which case purely predictive measures of performance are most appropriate) or some sort of equity metric where putting students from less socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds with stronger ones can result in higher upward mobility? One can certainly make the case that the Texan system could be failing on both accounts compared to say UCs, but you'd need to try to build a causal model to understand which school is producing better results for students that arrive.
Do universities exist for students? Or do students exist for universities?
I'm sure university administration believe the latter, but given that they're supported by the state (in UT's case, ~25% of their budget?) there's a pretty strong argument that they owe the people of the state education.
I believe california has a similar program (or did at some time since Bakke), specifically for UC (the "higher tier" university system, versus cal state system)
UC is the more elite of two separate state funded university systems in CA, but it has a similar guarantee (but not campus-of-choice), that evaluates earlier (counts only 10th and 11th grade) and has a 9% cutoff for the “in your class” guarantee, which is called “Eligibility in Local Context”.
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
They also guarantee admission to the top 9% statewide, even if they aren't top 9% of class.
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
California State University, the larger state-funded system, has a process called “redirection” which functions as a kind of admission guarantee for qualified California residents who are applying as first-time freshman or certain transfer statuses, but I can’t easily find clear documentation of the cutoff (which may just be the minimum CSU eligibility cutoffs), but in any case is broader than UCs.
I'm not convinced that Texas is more progressive here. (Even before considering the sibling comments that indicate that the actual current guarantee is less than the top 10%.)
The UC system includes schools like UC Merced which just aren't that competitive or prestigious to begin with, just as the UT system includes schools that are much less competitive/prestigious than UT Austin.
A state government might have a very liberal or conservative party in power ... and a given policy might be considered the opposite, but they're not going to revisit it all the time.
The reasons for the policy too might have nothing to do with 'conservative' and 'liberal'.
Personally, I'm not really sure I buy into the idea that any given University has to have a given admissions policy and be 'liberal' or 'conservative'. There's room for a mix of policies across universities IMO / should be a mix.
Fankly I think you could tell most people any random policy is 'conservative' or 'liberal' and they'd just support or oppose it based on that label.
Definitions are all dorked up... and 'conservative' and 'liberal' is too weird and narrow a lens to view everything through.
Just as an example George W. Bush ran a campaign that very vocally opposed "nation building", it was thought to be a very important conservative value. George W. Bush then started the largest / longest nation building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan in decades ...
These terms often don't make any sense when applied.
A regressive system takes away from those that don't have much to give to people that already have a lot.
In this way - a blanket statement of guaranteeing the top x% of students admission into state schools is - I would argue fair and reasonable - but I would also argue is regressive.
This is assuming the top x% of students come from wealthier & more educated families. It's possible this assumption isn't true.
I think progressive policies would be like those that make it easier for certain groups to get admitted (i.e. harder for other groups). This seems unfair, but if you want change, I don't see how you do it fairly.
The primary flip side to the top 10% law is that urban centers have much higher levels of competition than rural ones. If you happen to go to high school in Nowhere, Texas, it's quite easy to go to UT since achieving that top 6% is a somewhat trivial endeavor. Whereas if you go to an urban high school in a population center such as Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, you have to really apply yourself.
I think you mean if you go to a good school you need to apply yourself. If you live in a rough neighborhood and go to a bad school, it's not really all that difficult. Of course, you have to get through high school, which is not so easy in the rough neighborhoods. But you get the idea.
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
A law was passed in 2009 for the University of Texas specifically, that stated "the university must automatically admit enough students to fill 75 percent of available Texas resident spaces" [1]. That 10% number has dwindled down to the top 6%.
As a past automatic admission, I'm horrified hearing stories from coworkers. The process was never stressful for me -- I sent in one application, heard back before the holidays and was done.
[1] https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions#fndtn-freshman...
The University had 50,000 students at that time. During my time there, they were constantly trying to find a way to reduce that number and succeeded at some point, so the 2009 law may have been a result.
Just want to point out that the policy you're referring to was put in place while Democrats ran Texas. Historically Texas was a Democratic state, with only eight years of Republican governors from 1874-1995.
> more progressive than what we have in “liberal” California
And also that California was historically a Republican state. For most of the years from 1943-1999, they had a Republican governor.
California just made it very hard to game.
Also. as someone who grew up in Texas and now lives in California, I can tell you the UT System has more than its fair share of gaming attempts -- as such, you're ineligible for the automatic-in based on rankings if you switch schools in the last 2 years (i.e. you need to get in holistically), and those who attend private high schools also need to get in holistically (because top private schools got caught saying more than 7% of their students were in the top 7% and have non-state-standardized ranking criteria). Granted, being automatically admitted to one of the UT schools via rankings often does _not_ mean admission to UT Austin, but rather a satellite campus.
It's a decently progressive and fair system.
https://news.utexas.edu/2020/06/18/new-ranking-puts-ut-austi...
This was pre-internet, but people still tracked rankings across the state. One kid would transfer schools to bump their rank two spots. That would cascade to a flurry of transfers. All the top students knew where their GPA would place them in every other high school in the state and everybody was watching for movement. Eventually, they capped the program to be based on your rank midway through senior year to prevent 100s of transfers in the last month of the school year before graduation. Which of course, just moved the activity to the last month in the semester before the last semester before graduation. But then you had to maintain your GPA in the new school for a whole semester, so it involved more risk.
Now that I've told this whole story, let me say that none of it is true. Or, at least, I don't really know how much of it is true. I do know that it was the buzz among students when I was in school. I never entered that world very deeply. I'm pretty sure that it did happen a bit. Probably not as much as it was talked about.
This actually happened when UT started applying the rule. Parents moved their kids to less competitive schools.
As the article notes, you absolutely can go to a weaker high school to boost your chance into a UC (parents can also try dropping their income lower to boost their kids as well). Though, neither might not be a good strategy for the long-run anyway.
Native Texan here, not the first time I've heard this strategy.
For in state students, you really can't beat UT's cost to value ratio..people do try hard to get in.
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
Now imagine the situation for a student with a poor family who finds themselves in a school mostly with students from wealthy families? The "top-%" metric would doubly harm them.
On the plus side, at least the top-% metric provides an incentive for students to attend 'worse' schools, which to the extent that students are benefited by mixing with more capable students, could help everyone.
Aren't most schools small enough that this incentivizes sabotaging classmates to boost your relative rank?
For example, you may not take an elective (Photography) because getting the top grade in the class would still drop your overall GPA. Despite Spanish being available in middle school, our valedictorian waited until high school because it would count a point higher -- by the time you realize how to play the game, it might be too late.
The other example cited was kids attending a very competitive school up until their senior year and then moving to a less competitive school and graduating a higher rank.
It also encourages zero-sum thinking generally.
Unless we involve football, for example. Sports break the model.
Texan here. I'll share my story, at risk of coming across as big headed: I feel the 7% percent policy unfairly shut me out of a "better" school. I can't tell if it negatively or positively impacted my career. It either allowed me to focus more on becoming a better programmer (going to an easier school); or it made me lag in my career 1-2 years (not being able to go from a top school directly into FAANG/a SV startup).
For my first 1-2 years of HS, I had a somewhat challenging personal life and didn't take any advanced courses. It wasn't until the 3rd year I stepped up in every way possible, taking all AP courses, and getting 4-5s in 8 AP tests by graduation. I don't recall what my GPA was, but thanks to my false start it didn't meet the threshold, and I attribute being not accepted to UT to the fewer spots available due to the 7% rule.
( an aside, I'm still baffled at how this happened. By all accounts I was overqualified: won a regional UIL CS championship, had multiple gaming projects, knew multiple programming languages. There's a larger critique here about how the hell colleges determine admissions. I assume the quantitative, filterable metrics like GPA precluded anyone of importance from reading any of my qualitative attributes )
GPA is something you can game, and people in my school did. For example, the two highest level math courses you can take in HS is Calculus AB and Calculus BC–the former covers half a year of college-level math, and the latter covers a full year, both over the course of senior year. I chose BC due to an interest in math. Many others chose AB simply because they would both be weighted the same in GPA calculations, and clearly AB would be easier. The result is that the BC class had a dozen students and AB had 30. By informal surveying, the highest ranking students in the graduating class took AB, not BC. This is just one example: there are other ways a students can reduce how much they learn in favor of a higher GPA. I absolutely do not regret taking BC, it was the best part of my HS education. It's a shame it possibly harmed my college admissions.
In the end, I was rejected from my first choice (UT Austin), was accepted to University of Houston on a half-free ride, but was very disillusioned with the quality of their CS program during my entire tenure. I landed in a subpar job right out of college, and after a year at a software consulting firm for the oil industry I managed to get myself to Silicon Valley (after throwing a hail mary and moving to Seattle without a job–and then using a connection to a friend I met in Calculus BC to get a referral at a startup), where my career really started. In hindsight it was just a year or two, and perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but I think the admissions process at UT really failed to identify me as a worthy entrant, and I think the 7% rule exacerbated this. I used to be salty about this (in college / in my subpar job), but now I don't give it any thought.
I count myself lucky because, like many in this field, I was motivated to develop my programming skills outside school. Perhaps going to a weaker CS college allowed me to focus more on skills more relevant to software engineering (I even had time to consult in college).
________
btw, UT Austin has a unique provision in the Texas law that reduces the 10% requirement to slightly less, hence my usage of 7%. See https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/
In California the worthies are untitled hereditary aristocrats who secure political power by accumulating and supporting vast client populations. These clients vote for the aristocratic party and provide it with a patina of moral justification. It is an intensely traditional political form that can be found in other societies going back thousands of years. These aristocrats in turn ensure that big corporate interests get favored tax treatment (often effectively zero tax) while preventing small business competition through hyper regulation. BigCo gets subsidized and pays zero tax, LilCo gets hit with endless demands for paperwork and fines. You can find similar social forms in many societies throughout history: it's not special or unique.
While I (as a graduate of UT Austin) agree with most of your comment, I would like to know why you believe Texas' tax policies are progressive?
(Texas does not have an income tax, but does have (very high) property taxes. A resident of Texas with a large income but a small real-estate footprint pays relatively few taxes (which is why many wealthy individuals choose Texas as their state of residence) while an average homeowner, whose house is the largest asset, pays a greater relative tax rate.)
There isn't much that is progressive about property taxes. They affect the middle class much more than the poor (who often aren't homeowners) and the rich (who can afford high tax rates).
Texas specifically has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, and that's in part because we have no income tax. Income taxes, though, are actually progressive.
Note that Texas's high property tax rates is one of the significant contributors to gentrification.
Absolutely not. The burden of property taxes falls largely on the capitalized asset-value of real estate, so a typical middle-class household can offset much of that burden by paying for a smaller mortgage in the first place. And poor renters largely benefit by not having to pay local income or sales taxes, since the burden of the tax will fall on their landlords. Property taxes are in fact quite progressive.
For some states it is a flat rate, I know of one.
But to me is the largest issue is funding for public schools and quality. At one time you would leave high-school with an education that was similar to what you get now in a 4 year college.
These days all we are doing is running a kind-of day care until the public school student leaves to work at McDonalds in the afternoon once the School Day ends.
I also remember some Profs saying in many cases, the first year of collage is a re-education of what the student should already know.
* Consider a family where the highschool student has to work to help out with rent and food bills, so they miss school or don't have time to work on assignments. Compare this to a wealthier family where the student has all the free time in the world.
* Or consider a district that skews wealthier and tutors push the haves up into the 10%, and push the have nots below. Plenty of the have nots would have hit the 10% threshold if only they had money.
* Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities.
These are just a few I've read about off the top of my head. The idea of standardized testing is fair, but only if it is aware of inequities in the system. This has been a debate since the 70's. In fact, the popular TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" did an episode about systemic racism in standardized testing the early 1980's.
I'm not arguing if Cali has it right or wrong, but there are problems with using just testing.
You cannot resolve prior inequities by forcing students into college- they drop out at higher rates, with higher (unforgivable!) debts, and word of mouth of their experiences will continue to deter others from trying.
I personally witnessed this happen to friends I had made my freshman year at school.
The ACT in particular has a really low bar for anyone who does reasonably well in school- most state schools around here had a minimum score that certainly required no preparation to achieve.
Second, you are not offering an alternative solution that would be preferable.
Also, you are not recognizing that fixing in the top 6% is not a requirement for admission so it is possible for the situations you list to be addressed.
Finally you end with an argument against standardized testing which has nothing to do with the comment you are replying to. In fact the 6% policy allows a student to get into the university without ever taking a standardized test.
> Or consider being a minority in a very white district that isn't fond of minorities
For example these people by your own definition will be rare. They might also be disadvantaged in other ways should they live elsewhere, which means that that the same person in two different places would simply face a different set of disadvantages which might even themselves out. Likewise "a district that skews wealthier" should naturally have fewer "have-nots" than other districts so "have-nots" themselves would not be disadvantaged on average.
I don’t know how many hours of studying 50th percentile is or whatever, by the way. This just comes from the math and the fact that the test scores are “ex Gaussian” - skewed normal, where the small skew is explained by everything that isn’t G, like studying.
Anecdotally, I write this comment from the couch of a poor family. My girlfriend’s parents (who I am visiting) live on welfare in a 1 bedroom apartment (hence the couch we are sleeping on). They have a 15-year-old son who could potentially benefit from test prep. He’d also benefit more immediately from a haircut, new clothes, and a therapist. If the parents had $1000, they’d probably buy all of that instead, or lottery tickets.
Extra anecdotally, I also have a 15-year-old stepsister, who has a rich mom. She has new clothes, a nice haircut, and antidepressants. Soon she’ll have a car for when she’s 16 and most likely will revive some SAT prep. I have noticed (or at least have theorized) that because my girlfriend’s family cannot afford these things for their children, her young brother in a state of arrested development. His lack of luxury is causing him to miss certain life milestones. His maturity is stunted (even for a 15-year-old boy) and he would not be a good candidate for test prep.
> This summer, Wang and his two younger brothers shared a room with one bunk bed, taking turns sleeping on the floor’s bamboo mat. His parents were in the other bedroom, with his sister and youngest brother. If test-prep classes were ever a financial burden for them, they never showed it, brushing off Wang’s questions, he says, telling him: “You’re just a little kid. Calm down, and leave the finances to us.”
That's like another planet for me. Should kids really need to focus on their career so early?
America has to compete with Asia now. The self-indulgent culture that arose from America being unchallenged on the world stage will have to come to an end.
15 years ago, I would have agreed with you because I thought the Asian system couldn’t produce innovators like the American system. China has proved that wrong.
"There is only one group of students who are “overrepresented,” to use the chilling language of social engineering, at the university: Asian Americans. Twelve percent of K–12 students are Asian or Pacific Islander, compared with 34 percent of UC undergraduates. Aligning enrollment with state demographics would require cutting the share of those students by almost two-thirds. It would mean getting right with contemporary concepts of anti-racism by reviving one of California’s most shameful traditions: clearing Asians out of desirable spaces.
[...]
The UC has an established history in this dirty art. In the 1960s, Asian enrollment at UC Berkeley was strong, and it soared through the ’70s. But in the ’80s, it plummeted mysteriously. Berkeley was investigated by the Department of Education, and in 1989, the chancellor apologized and pledged that this would never happen again."
Honestly, standardized test scores and some case study type questions would be sufficient to make a decision (along with 1 on 1 convos). I hope a decision like this opens a channel for smart people to get to employment without having to go to school or spend as much time in it.
Edit:
Some people are commenting that relying on scores from years ago can unfairly disadvantage people who have improved since then, and can generally be misleading. I agree with that.
There should be a robust ecosystem of aptitude tests that are generally accepted, are as unbiased (culturally) as possible, and that can be retaken at any time.
I think it's developing, as I've seen some examples of this in the hiring process.
This means wealthy families are substantially advantaged in SAT test performance. As a measure of preparation more than potential it may well serve as strong indicator future academic participation, but for all the wrong reasons. As such it can be used as a tool for exclusivity as a measure of anything.
To adequately test for performance biases aside divergent tests are better than conforming tests. The difference is the former tests for answer distribution, quantity, and validity where the later asserts correctness by asserting one answer against a single approved answer.
To kinda bounce of your comment and replies, no, I don't think the SAT is racist in any way.
However, I don't think it's a particular useful metric by itself.
I had a near perfect SAT score (sans all this private tutoring people are talking about), but was an absolutely terrible college student. Just wasn't for me, and despite trying twice, I never really got anywhere. I wish I hadn't spent the money. And I hope I didn't prevent someone who was truly more motivated an opportunity in doing so.
You say you don't understand the hate for SAT, but then proceed with an example of how you did better than your ex-gf in college despite doing presumably worse on the SAT then her?
No SAT, no admission, I think would have been the case for me.
Next on this list will be scholarships and admissions for elite sports. Rowing and gymnastics all favor the wealthy.
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/views/2020/08/17/h...
Maybe we need randomized admissions when kids qualify above a threshold...
That won't work.
The whole point is this is social engineering to ensure that demographics at universities match demographics at large.
Truly random admissions won't guarantee that especially when the applicant pool doesn't match the demographics at large to begin with.
College sports is a racket though for sure.
You can argue about availability of AP classes / funding / etc, but that doesn't detract from the hard work of the AP students. Plenty of rich white kids take hard AP classes and get D's.
Getting into an advanced class generally means you already know the material that would be in the normal class (taking trig the year everyone else is taking geometry, for instance). How did you get to where you already knew that material? Well, you were either in the advanced class the year before, or, you already learned the material outside of class. How did you already learn the material outside of class? Better education at home. Which is easy to do with a private tutor or stay at home parent; really hard to do with a single parent, or dual income that don't allow for much in education expenses.
And because you are in an advanced class, you basically get a .5-1.0 bump to your GPA (so people are graduating with a 4.5 GPA at some schools), all because you had the extra early resources; you can't compete with just what the school provides.
For one eye-popping counterexample to the notion that redistributionary school funding policies are effective, it might be worth understanding what happened in Newark[0], where 75% of the school is paid for the state already.
There's only a small number of wealthy areas (1% of the population perhaps) that have excess funding. Generally, the funding policies ensure worst schools get more funding. Here's how LA County looks: http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php. -- poor performing LAUSD is easily in the top 10th percentile by funding, strong Arcadia and Pasadena are well below average.
Funding is not the problem.
That brings $17k down to $8.5k. The average spend per student in K-12 schools nationally is more than $12k.
San Francisco may be significantly underfunded in a nontrivial number of its schools.
Moreover, some kind of equalization had existed since the 1980s as a consequence of both Prop 13 and Serrano vs. Priest.
It hasn’t fixed the problem.
The rich neighborhoods (and working class neighborhoods that value education) have better schools because their kids are on average better students. They make sure of it and set high expectations.
Nobody believes that you if you just funded Northeastern Illinois State University the same as Northwestern that the student outcomes would be the same. Why do we think the same thing doesn't apply in elementary and high school.
Want to fix the problem? School vouchers at the statewide level.
It’s a shame that the law only applied in full effect for 10 years. That’s barely enough time to fix a generation of students.
Does spending per pupil even correlates with outcomes?
> rather than whichever random zip code you’re born into.
Is it random or the result of the parents hard work?
Lastly, the phrase “parents’ hard work” implies a lot about the core problem here. It’s no secret that wealthy families have a multi-generational advantage on less fortunate ones. Immigrating to this country and working your entire life is hard, and you may still never break out of your socioeconomic class. Perhaps your children may go further, but that’s significantly harder when their education is funded proportionally to your initial circumstances. Success isn’t just hard work, it’s the luck of your innate talents and abilities. It’s also being born at the right time and place to make a better life for your kids.
This is a non-starter for any family that depends on public school buses to transport their kids to school. It might help to some extent in regions if schools are in close proximity but overall it just becomes "School choice for people with parents that can afford it".
Plus I would be surprised if it there's a case the program led to a 'bad' school closing and a 'good' school opening on the same facility/location. What tends to happen (my state has this) is that rich/educated parents do everything they can to get their 3-5 year old into the best school and the poor/uneducated kids are still stuck at the 'bad' school. The 'good' school ends up with a large waitlist which wealthy parents work around by moving close enough (which costs more) such that the good school is the default school for them.
The only equitable method would to make every school use a 100% raffle system but that's not logistically possible.
You end up failing at your job not by virtue of teaching worse (you might be teaching better), but in not figuring out how to bias your application/admissions process.
Its so obvious and it’s never on the table, which tells me everything I need to know about “reformers”.
Until this is done, most everything else it shuffling deck chairs.
Not only do lotteries mitigate Goodhart's Law (which rewards 'bad' candidates who appear good, whilst punishing 'good' candidates who don't appear that way); but even a perfect, un-gameable measure can waste resources chasing diminishing returns. Even something as trivial as spelling mistakes can be decisive; and whilst those judging might only care a little about spelling, candidates care a lot about winning, so it's in their interest to obsess over even such minor things.
This imposes a massive opportunity cost, whether it's spending whole childhoods in 'cram schools'; or university salaries going to 'grant proposal writing services' rather than educators and researchers; etc.
Except for the gigantic study commissioned by the UC system the article references?
“ Second, while high-school GPA has been found to be more predictive of success at college than standardized test scores at some schools, the exact opposite turns out to be true for students at UC schools. There, standardized test scores say more about which applicants are likely to earn a degree and to do it in less than eight years; they also correlate strongly with students’ GPA at the university.”
I will ask you this: why do you think black people are overrepresented in the NBA relative to their share of the population? Could it be because black culture highly values sports and black kids tend to spend more time than the average kid playing sports due to parental or cultural influence? That same logic applies to Asians and education.
Americans love meritocracy and hard work when it comes to sports, and can't stand it when it comes to academics and the resulting income.
UC reports international students separately. They also have dedicated reports for CA. Here's the CA admissions data: https://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/_f...
> For further reference; AAPI students are __NOT__ included in Underrepresented Minority (URM) calculations - even though in many cases a layperson __WOULD__ include them;
Not in higher ed.
The report cited in the article isn't as clear on their distinction and in some cases the numbers indicate that the comparisons are among feeder, in-state high schools; and others are general enough that the lack of detail is concerning as the study leaves out the total population and only provides percentages.
> Not in higher ed.
While the common/colloquial understanding through recent years shows that Asian students are more represented in higher ed; the general notion of what URM is codified as in higher ed contexts is less known; and wasn't clearly defined in the article. And I initially spoke too broadly, as the PI (pacific islander) portion of AAPI is included in URM, the Asian portion is not; and the PI portion is not mention anywhere in the article; and with AAPI discrimination being in the current cultural Zeitgeist, if that distinction goes unmentioned it's a leading statement.
Tricky article!
* more likely to apply to private schools
* more able to afford private schools
* more likely to get accepted to private schools that don't have the same race-blind admissions restrictions that UCs do
* more likely to go out-of-state for college
[1] https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/chapt...
Also, it looks like the study is following federal guidelines (IPEDS/NCES) on student groups; so Asian in this context for international students includes everyone from Korea, China, and Japan, down to the Malaysian Peninsula, through India, all the way west to the Arabian Peninsula (you know, like about 50% of the world population, no biggie there); so there may be some weird mixing of what's included in the denominator for AAPI students.
The problem is much more fundamental, we need to try to solve the severe economic stresses for underprivileged kids’ families if we want them to have a fair shot at higher education and the success it supposedly grants, not these little tactical band-aids. They need economic opportunities and safety nets.
But, putting that aside, isn't ~$2k per class per day enough, even in San Francisco? If we were to increase funding for SFUSD, would outcomes improve?
- [20 students/class] * [$17k/year/student] / [180 days/year]
Source? We spend more and more on education every year with nothing to show for it[1][2]. Throwing more money at students absolutely does not mean they will be more successful[3]. This is not a problem that can be solved with money.
[1] https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart....
[2] https://reason.org/commentary/inflation-adjusted-k-12-educat...
[3] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
Are they really less funded? Interestingly, poorer schools are often eligible for state and federal grants.
> The second is that just having money doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be managed well by the administration.
That's interesting.
The spirit of the law remains in effect today. People like me who currently own a home in the Austin, TX area pay a lot of money via property taxes. School taxes very often make up over half of the property tax burden here, which is already quite high since there is no state income tax and the state has to make money somehow. Almost all of that money is effectively swept up and redistributed to the rest of the state due to the recapture laws.
Here's an article that discusses its current impacts in more detail: https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-rec...
I don't doubt that funding is part of it, but there's definitely some more nuance to it.
No, it's called social darwinism.
How can you argue against this? Isn't this obvious? Isn't this what genetics is all about --- parents' genes being passed to offspring?
You're either blinded by your ideology... or maybe don't understand biology.
OP’s comment about other needs (haircut, clothes, etc.) is very real. Where would you suggest test prep stacks relative to paying rent on time, food, clothes, etc.? Are you really suggesting that all poor families that haven’t spent on test prep are simply ignorantly misprioiritizing spend? It seems like there’s a massive gap between your life perspective and that of a poor person’s.
> OP’s comment about other needs (haircut, clothes, etc.) is very real.
Those are short-term expenses. Families can plan for long-term expenses over years. By your logic poor people would never be able to afford a car. But 80% of people living in poverty do have access to a vehicle.
> Are you really suggesting that all poor families that haven’t spent on test prep are simply ignorantly misprioiritizing spend?
I don't know what the priority should be for doing well on tests. My point is that a $1,400 one-time expense is not out of reach even for most poor people.
And nobody said "all."
> It seems like there’s a massive gap between your life perspective and that of a poor person’s.
I grew up very comfortable, but I have family from Bangladesh who immigrated to pretty close to the bottom of the totem pole. Not the very bottom, not homeless, but public housing, working the lowest end service jobs, etc. My wife's parents grew up extremely poor (as in buying meat at the grocery store was a luxury until she was an older kid). Many people really don't understand the difference between people who are destitute (which is a very small number of people) and "normal" poor people.
* families, often very poor Asians as stated, prioritized saving up for test prep, or
* the kids didn't need it and got the score anyway.
Which would you prefer to support your ideological priors?
That's how the valedictorian and salutatorian a year or so after me ended up with final grades of something like 103.4 and 103.5.
That USED to be line line but it has since changed: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...
No amount of expensive tutors is going to help a rich kid on the SAT unless they really do all the work.
You can look at the data[1] yourself. It's clear that of in-state students enrolling in UCs (not international), Asian Americans make up 36% of enrollees and white Americans make up 20% of enrollees (indeed "underrepresented"). It seems like you are leading on with your comments that it is maybe OK to cut down on Asian representation because most of those students are probably international anyway (which I also don't agree with), but the data clearly shows that such a cut to Asian representation would harm Asian Americans as well.
[1] https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2021/chapt...
Again, as I noted to the GP, the study is not clear in all cases what n they are using when calculating their percentages, and the author of the article takes advantage of that.
Further, you're reading a lot into my comments; I am neither advocating for or against changes to given policy, but that the study leaves inconsistencies that the author readily takes advantage of for their own agenda.
Let's examine the substance of the points the article makes.
> Yet when the money is being transferred to other districts, it becomes a state issue and is therefore a state property tax, which is illegal in Texas.
Ah, geez.
> Furthermore, taking funds from one district to another makes accountability for funding convoluted [...] how will they ever know if their money is being used constructively?
Sure, there's also no way to definitively say that the money is _not_ being used constructively.
> The percentage of Texans graduating was stagnant from 1993 to 2003 - stuck at 77%. If the "Robin Hood" system is supposed to bring up the weaker districts (which tend to be the poorer ones), the statistics show no signs of improvement.
The graduation rate isn't the sole metric that should be considered to make this argument. And even if it is considered, you'd only want to consider the graduate rate change across time in the weaker/poorer districts, not across the whole state.
Is there an article with better criticism? The English Wikipedia entry doesn't really mention any, besides "oh no it's actually a state tax".
Here is a more recent article with some numbers that I linked in a sibling comment that details how Texas has essentially painted itself into a corner with Robin Hood funding: https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-rec...
Everyone seems to acknowledge that its current implementation is somewhat problematic but there really isn't a clear path forward for resolving the issues with the system that is tenable in the current Texas political and legal climate.
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/04/06/wil...
> All those taxes aren’t going to poorer districts; the money goes to the state, which also uses it to offset other parts of the budget. “Where did the state spend the ‘savings?’” says a slide from Taxparency Texas. It lists $2.6 billion for cuts in the business franchise tax and $1.2 billion for increasing the homestead exemption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sander
They should oppose it because it likely harms black people.
The pro-209 campaign was outspent something like $27M to $1.6M but still prevailed.
The parent comment is saying that with the SAT removal, the only hard number the admissions officers have left to use is GPA. And GPA is just as gameable, if not even moreso than SAT scores, for kids with wealthy parents.
There may be a few very large issues, but also a gazillion small factors that make up systemic discrimination, both racially and against women. It is impossible for minorities to fight those individually, especially not from a position of weakness. It is more effective to counter at least a small part of the net discriminative effect by relatively simple quotas.
And usually those policies don't make up the balance anyway.
Providing programs to help those in a weaker economic position more directly addresses the need, results in programs that everyone can feel that maybe they or their family might benefit from, and avoids perpetuating raced based discrimination and the resulting resentment.
If when economic equality isn't the inequality you're attempting to correct it's so highly correlated that it should be sufficient-- after all, a big part about why we care about the lasting effects of historic racism is that it has produced a lasting weakened economic standing.
You are basically saying if someone is more educated, that they will do better in education.
Yes, that's the point. The more time and effort someone spends in their education, the better they will do in education.
That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves as an indirect proxy for money, rather than a reasonable consideration for class performance, knowledge, aptitude, or any such thing.
So if you engage in more and better education, above and beyond the education that one is engaging in school, then that person will be better at education?
Yes, of course.
Just like if someone practices basketball, outside of their school team, and hires a basketball tutor, then they would become better at basketball.
Obviously, if someone spends more of their own time on something, anything, whether it is education, or basketball, or whatever, then they would become better at that thing.
The only question now, is why would that possibly surprise you, that people who go above and beyond whatever everyone else is doing, would become better than everyone else at that thing?
> That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves as an indirect proxy for money,
So you think poor people just don't work hard enough? Only rich people care about their future and are willing to put in the effort to better themselves?
Sounds like some conservative propaganda to me....
No
>"Not using it in its current form is the strongest influence it has to incentivize change."
What change (and by whom) is/should UC incentivize?
It doesn't get you into the top UC though (which Texas' program does), just any. There is wide variance in UC schools.
And what is the "top" UC anyways. This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I personally think more favorably of UCSD over cal, and, for some disciplines Davis or SC over cal. UCLA is highly regarded across the board and probably exceeds cal, for, say pre-nursing program.
This is not how the rental business works. Property tax is simply a cost passed on to the renter.
In addition, it's erroneous to think that property taxes are shouldered by landlords. They are, in fact, passed on to renters.
My entire college-bound peer group took the SAT twice, once without the essay and once with the essay. Literally all of us, every single friend/acquaintance in my year. Most of us took the PSAT (practice SAT) to get used to the "timing" of multiple choice. (When you're low on time, its time to start guessing and moving way quicker)
The exceptions were the military dudes, who left for the Iraq / Afghanistan wars. So they had no need to take the SATs.
We all were worried about how the essay would be graded, whether or not colleges would accept the essay score, or whatever. Some of us even took alternative tests (ACT) in addition to the SAT (I only took the SAT twice).
For us, the essay thing was announced long-in-advance and we literally strategized our college acceptance plans around it. I don't know who figured out the essay announcement, but... it was very well known in my bubble.
If all that's true, then yeah, it's just the kids' choice of how they spend their time and effort, and NOT a proxy for wealth. But I don't think all of that is true.
This thinking model is best to be dropped into the dustbins of history.
Like many things, this is in large part about liberal white people wanting to engage in social engineering on behalf of minorities who mostly don’t support their policy. Like “defund the police.”
This whole controversy is about a handful of the most elite schools in the nation. I find it more than a bit silly tbh, since whatever admissions policy they choose it's not going to be even close to affecting "the majority" of prospective students. We should be working to expand access to education at every level, not just focusing on such a tiny minority.
Come on guys, to be less racist we must be MORE racist!
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-score-chart-raw-score-conve...
It counted as 2 classes when it came to calculating your GPA...and accordingly was supposed to take up 2 "slots" on your schedule. However it didn't and instead the 2nd slot was always after school, which nobody went to anyways. So it allowed you to fit N+1 AP classes into what would normally be a N class schedule and gave a major advantage when calculating class rank.
As a result you got some very interesting people taking this class who you would never expect, simply to boost their class rank. It saddens me a little now to realize that these kids schedules were planned out from the beginning from fall freshman year to optimize their GPA...but I went to a very competitive school so in retrospect it makes sense.
Bonus, to your point they offered ap options for most arts and electives! You could take AP photography or "honors" art/music which counted as an AP for weighted gpa calculations :P
So students can take a college class, get an A, and receive college credit. Or they can take an AP class, get an A, then take an exam that might determine whether they get college credit. Why take an AP English class when you could just take College Freshman English? Because the AP class will be better for your GPA.
I get to see first hand when advisers are sticking a kid in an AP Government class that is completely pointless instead of the Honors Biology class for GPA reasons. Never mind that the kid wants to be a botonist or marine biologist or anesthesiologist. We don't have room for that. We have to maximize their GPA. Stick them in AP English instead of normal Stats even if they could be in Stats and normal English and are more interested in Stats.
If your kid didn't take the Honors Ag class as a freshman, they're already mathematically eliminated. They will never recover the additional 0.025 point GPA advantage. There are only 64 academic slots available in a four year schedule. There are are 32 highest weighted classes, 16 mid-weights, and 24 low-weights. Only four of those can be taken as a freshman. If you miss just one opportunity, you're out.
So you have a 4.0/4.0 GPA, 4.625/4.75 weighted GPA, and a class ranking of 53.
And hopefully a support group that helped you understand and choose what is most important in life.
I always felt quite vindicated when I got my class rank (8/432) even though I had a "normal" schedule. 0, 3, 6, 7 APs. I even took a free period and only had 6 classes junior year as opposed to the normal 7!
I can't really speak to your opinion piece because its behind a paywall
They can, but will they? Plus, it seems like GPA would be even easier for the wealthy to game, many fancy prep schools sell themselves on their ability to place kids in good colleges. If those kids no longer need to perform well on a standardized tests they just need a high GPA, that seems even easier from the school to guarantee.
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/05/national-review-william-...
Alas, my alma mater did not, and it was pretty obvious to everyone that they were athletes first, and kept up appearances about schooling. I am reasonably confident that several degree programs that the school offered would not have existed if the football and basketball programs didn't exist.
Would they have been able to let in more students who would have bean more focused on schooling? Honestly, I don't know, but I strongly suspect there are lower hanging fruit to pick first.
In an urban area, residential areas are typically segregated by wealth, and wealthier parents want their kids to go to good schools. Further, they are capable of moving within the area so that their children go to good schools. As a result, the competition among students for the top N% more fierce due to the pre-selection of students.
I think making the system more equitable by supporting kids from all backgrounds is socially beneficial, even if it sometimes makes suburbanites complain.
But why threaten to become a racist particularly?
We need discourse, demonstrations and solutions, that insititions should very well look for and nuture young talent from wherever it may come from.
But to threaten to be actively racist, without ecploring any other solution is truly telling.
I assume you're referring to the practice of requiring higher scores for Asian students? And then doing away with the standardized tests altogether when it got too hard to get the outcomes you want? That active racism?
That embeds some really questionable assumptions about “some groups.”
One, you have to define merit and whether it really is merit. If a rich kid scores higher because he got an expensive private tutor that taught him how to do better on the test really more meritorious than the smarter poor kid who scored lower because she didn't have said private tutor?
Second, you have historically marginalized groups that lose out because their ancestors were systematically abused, not allowed to be educated, not allowed into most institutions.
Saying that it should all just be a meritocracy now is like someone that gets a big headstart in a race and then once that headstart is pointed out, they start calling for fair play.
Even in a racial quota based admission system, the elimination of standardized testing from each racial "tranche" only helps the wealthy. It's simply more expensive to fill a admission full of impressive extracurriculars and such than to do well on a test. Standardized testing was brought in to favor the intelligent over the wealthy to begin with, and while test scores and wealth are correlated this is in part because the entire point was to give better testers access to wealth and test taking ability is heritable.
It comes back to the question of what universities should prioritize. Should they be optimizing for the fairest / most equal student body, or the most gifted / competitive student body?
What you want is the most talented, hardest working, brightest students. That's difficult to discern given the differences in the availability of opportunity. Scaling for availability is hard.
But it is clear that just selecting for the students who succeeded in the best environment will leave you missing out on potential. And worse, that rapidly becomes self-reinforcing, since the next generation of students will be influenced by your choices on this one.
Also, GPA is not a great measure of student quality. IRT [1,2] is better.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1434976 [2] https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...
If we're saying that AP tests and classes are too easy, then of course people can have a discussion about increasing difficulty.
Stats from https://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration-Servi...
That and babysitting so parents can work without their kids setting the house on fire.
Personally I think there should be a lottery system after a certain grade/extracurricular cut-off. The difference at a certain point between students is negligible and a lottery system would help alleviate some bias. Of course there's plenty of things wrong with this approach as well, you're never going to find something that pleases everyone.
> How do I know all of this? Because unlike the regents, who enthusiastically voted to eliminate the tests for the first time in 2020, I did not ignore the findings of a 225-page report that was prepared for them at the request of the UC’s then-president, Janet Napolitano. This report[1], by the Academic Council’s Standardized Testing Task Force, was based on years of UC admissions data and was the product of a tremendous amount of work by a formidable team of experts in statistics, medicine, law, philosophy, neuroscience, education, anthropology, and admissions.
> The scholars determined that the obvious challenges faced by low-income Black and Latino students were poverty and poor K–12 education. And they found that the UC’s use of standardized tests did not amplify racial disparities. They agreed that the university should continue using test scores in admissions, but recommended that the UC begin developing its own test, which would be designed to meet the needs of both students and the institution.
[1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/...
If it is the link in the chain which makes sure the disparity is carried on, especially to bigger amplifiers like college admission, then the decision to abandon it is clear.
It was also the place with the densest collection of high-achieving, highly intelligent colleagues that I’ve ever experienced.
What even is the point of living if society deems people like me to be inherently inferior for life?
EDIT: Don't understand the downvotes. I went to a top liberal arts college and they told us to, if it was over a certain number. It worked broadly speaking.
I did not do well on my SATs (1500/1600) - do you think there's any way to make up for this? Or am I supposed to be as unimpressive as I was at 17 forever?
I've almost never heard of anyone caring about their SAT scores since freshman/sophomore year of college. The only people who still talk about them are the people who did really well on them complaining that they didn't help get them jobs once they graduated.
Test prep does not give much of a an edge. It certainly isn't comparable to those point-differences between groups (and therefore the effective "bonus points" often given for being a member of certain groups).
Everything they teach in those prep courses is available in books you can get for a few bucks (like 12-16). If you're really strapped, you can probably get prior years' books for next-to-nothing (this is what I did in the days before the internet, finding them at thrift stores for pennies). I suspect if you compared test prep takers to people who actually worked through the books (or comparable info from the internet) and practice tests the advantage would disappear (if not reverse).
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/07/why-po...
The reason that the racial component comes out is that Black children are over-represented in poor communities due to systemic racism
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/16/books/what-is-intelligenc...
[1]: https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/1994/10/16/books/what-is-...
Going much over 100 has little correlation with wealth which is what most studies use. Then you run into correlation doesn’t equal causation problem too.
Historical racism isn't the same thing as the nebulous, impossible to define "systemic" racism, which basically means whatever the activist group pushing it wants it to mean. Typically, they look at any discrepancy in outcomes between two groups, ignore the complex multi-variate nature of said issue, and reduce it down to race, making the claim of "systemic" racism. The vast majority of CS grads from universities are males, but you never see this mentioned in claims of "systemic sexism" in the tech industry. Gender activism, like race activism, only goes in one direction, always.
The same activist groups tend to ignore factors such as 50% of all murders in the US being perpetrated by, and victimizing, Black Americans. This kind of statistic is inconvenient for their narrative of police deliberately arresting people based on race, vs. the fact that they commit crimes disproportionately. Also, constantly cited is the discrepancy in crack penalties vs. cocaine penalties. This ignores the fact that crack and meth (a drug used predominantly by Whites) have equivalently harsh penalties, and also ignores the fact that these harsh penalties were demanded and campaigned for by Black politicians in the 90's, reacting to the destruction of their communities by the crack epidemic. There is a clear record of this, as evidenced by Joe Biden being a huge proponent of the Crime Bill. He and other Democrats were being urged to push the Crime Bill by his own party's Black politicians.
Growing up in the rural south in a trailer park, the subculture of White people I belong to commit crimes at vastly higher rates than Whites in other parts of the country. They are arrested and shot by police at equally higher rates as well. Again, the low-resolution, activist driven narrative ignores all of this, treating White people in New York City and in Kentucky as being part of a homogenous group, instead of correctly identifying the vast cultural differences between the two going back to the completely different European cultures they are descended from (Dutch/wealthy English vs. dirt poor Ulster Scots emigrants).
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Italian_regio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRP_p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Belgian_provinces_by_G...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_A_and_B
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Romania_-_Nominal_GD...
Do you think that targeting people based on income level would be a superior way to address this issue? If it was based on income, rather than skin color, wouldn't it disproportionately help Black children while simultaneously not leaving other disadvantaged groups out in the cold?
Unfortunately, what I suspect is going on with all this high minded "get rid of the SATs" is really going to at least help the universities combat what was an increasing pressure to do pre and post testing to validate or establish the value of a university's program. You cannot as easily gain useful information if you have no pre-test.
The very irony of this is of course that it is a kind of deliberate and manipulative breaking of the scientific process by universities who will simply claim even more profusely that their graduates improve over 4 years of study, without any control of variables.
The only possibility I see to circumvent what may be a devious scheme is for citizens to press state Legislatures to require a pre-test on entry and a post-test on graduation. Expect extreme pushback though because the data that is available strongly indicates that universities are largely not actually conferring the value one may expect. In other words, the quality of the students on entry is the primary determination of the quality of the student on graduation, which seems to hold across the board.
The administration will all profess a desire not to be so beholden but it’s part of the game so to speak, you have to play.
Source: current board member of a public university college
I hadn't considered that. Good insight.
Rankings are an easy "objective" measurement administrators can take to financial supporters (either government or private) and say "Here's what we're spending your dollars on." Consequently, rankings become very important to administrators.
The metric that can be measured is not the eternal metric. The result that can be result-driven is not the eternal result.
The best students were called 4clickers. They sat in the front row, with four color pens in hand. They never helped, and one on occasion turned her in for cheating. She used to talk about how competitive thstudrnts were. They all wanted a spot in a graduate program. It was the most depressing school I ever visited. Couldn't wait to leave on Sunday. (I was suprised she cheated, but it taught me something about "the high caliber" student.)
But if you're in one of those programs where the Undergrad is fairly worthless by itself and are competing for a limited number of slots at a prestigious grad program, that's when then cutthroats start to emerge.
Regardless, the argument here is simply which people they select. Assuming they hold 90% of spots for Texans (required by law), it's just a question of how they select people. The university wants to select the strongest students holistically (which some additional diversification criteria) - the state wants it to select the top 7% of students from every high school. Even if you argue the people are owed a state education, either criterion is a valid way to select the students that attend.
Or the student who was tied for #1 when the school decided they wouldn't accept ties. So they did pole vault scoring and reached back to kindergarten to see who got the first B.
In academics as in sports and all other pursuits, sometimes you just have to be satisfied with excellence regardless of trophies.
It must create a weird dynamic to have two identifiable groups where you know one got there on merit alone, while the other one maybe benefited from a quota.
But the application of course states that race and gender are not considered....hmmm.
You do realize that it is possible for it to be both right?
The question is whether or not it helps more than it hurts and no one seems to care that it helps the students from poorer areas distinguish themselves.
[1]https://www.thoughtco.com/sat-scores-for-ivy-league-admissio...
If you saw my resume you’d understand how hopeless it is for people like me. It’s depressing.
This understandably made people unhappy at the host school - ~7% of the class is academic high achievers from out of the school zone who take most of the admission spots reserved for the top N%.
I don't know of any cases of parents moving to avoid the extra competition, but I probably wouldn't have heard of that if it happened. I do know of some people set on going to UT who did not apply to the magnet program so they could have less competition.
The point here is you don't need to move to a rural area to decrease school competition. There are plenty of cases where you can move a mile to get into the zone of a less competitive school.
They'll often go straight for petroleum engineering if their career path is as calculated during college as it was in high school, and end up with a six figure salaxy at age 22 (not sure this still works as of 2020 given the problems with Houston's gas sector).
For some parents, making sure their child has a sure fire path to the middle class is what they consider their main responsibility, and will do things as crazy as move to a worse school district just to get them on the above track.
If you're as cynical about the value of education (to provide a "job") as the people described, you'll absolutely sacrifice the quality of your kids education (moving to a school with ostensibly less talented or credentialed teachers and possibly less academically gifted peers to learn from and larger class sizes) in order to game the system.
Nobody with money goes out of their way to send their children to a school in a 'common' part of town, because they don't want their children to mix up with 'the wrong kind' of people.
Why should my chance of getting into college be hampered by where my parents live or what color skin they gave me??
Aiding one person is inherently discriminating against another.
Why should theirs be hampered by the same?
A: We want equality, why are white people successful?
B: Clearly because they went to a good college.
C: Okay easy, let’s put the underprivileged into good colleges, that should fix ‘er right up.
It doesn't seem like anybody is interested in solving the hard problem of why underprivileged communities aren’t producing good high school graduates. Maybe it has something to do with, IDK, the fact that they’re under served and underprivileged? Maybe primary education is a more important factor than the name at the top of your college transcript? Maybe good communities produce outstanding colleges and universities, not the other way around? Yet we can’t seem to spend money on primary education or figure out how to help struggling communities. Why is that?
That's not to say that racism isn't a problem; it is, and we should fix it. It's not going to magically solve problems like graduation rates and income gaps, however.
I coach little league, and have been following a group of now ten year olds since 2016 or so. They are all awesome, but the cracks that come from family life and environment are starting to show up. I fear for a few of them.
The same people who are seeking equity in college are seeking it in high school and elementary school and preschool. The same opponents and arguments come out against them at all of these phases.
I have personal experience with this work in both the elementary school and high school levels. What you are saying here is simply false.
In light of that, Sowell's take makes no sense.
The author is missing the point of this education.
For almost ALL students the aim is to get a prestigious certificate as this is the gateway to a upper middle class lifestyle.
The education is largely irrelevant. (Most are going to end up as real estate agents of financial advisors anyway).
Which is why a bunch of rich Hollywood folk were recently bust for bribing their way into top Californian colleges. It was not for the calculus.
Fear not for the kids: these top universities handle the intellectual demands with soft courses, grading on a curve, supplementary exams, oral exams, etc.
The only real challenge is to get in. Politicising it is the best approach for a large demographic.
I wonder if that push toward diminishing the impact of measurable, standardized testing isn't an attempts at generating more "equally qualified applicants"
I think the article also noted that in many cases, the questions really discriminated more against poverty than race. Race gets dragged in because people of color are drastically overrepresented in poverty, so anything impacted by poverty will also show an effect along racial boundaries (at least when aggregated).
The underlying question is whether the score boost you get from being born into a high enough social class to have wide exposure to things like that actually makes you more qualified or not. It certainly boosts your test scores, but does knowing what an armoire is actually make you more qualified, or does it just keep poor people out?
Here’s the “logic”: If we give a standardized test to a random selection of people and then look at the results and add a racial overlay, white people (allegedly) disproportionately succeed. Therefore the test itself is racist. It is an unwanted artifact that encodes the privileged (alleged) majority’s innate biases and confers structural racism upon future generations. These artifacts must be purged. This is the way.
Let’s concede for a moment the definition of structural racism and agree it’s worth addressing in the admissions process. The problem then is not the desire to address the perceived oppression, but rather the conclusion that we should just tear down the racist institution without a viable replacement on hand. If we tear down pillars of rational society (or, western liberalism), then what remains is not ideologically consistent.
So, yeah, that's true of API, but its just as true of, say, White.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000292970...
Yes, "Continental superpopulations" is a more accurate term but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue...
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSmcWGV...
The API group is basically "everyone else".
Let us look at the USA of today and its social ills. Quality of a random person's life is undeniably better if they manage:
* to avoid going into jail/prison, * to always have a home, * to be drug-free, or at least drug addiction-free, * to be fit (= not obese), * to be employed or self-employed, * to finish their high school education at least.
Those points might sound modest, but if someone can tick off all of them, they are already sorta successful, especially compared to someone who can only tick off one or two.
A nation of people who could tick off 5 of 6 would probably be much happier than contemporary America.
Do all those points correlate with IQ? I would guess yes, but IANA Social Scientist.
The activists who talk about inequities at the population group level, and ignore the statistics on teen birth rates and single parent family rates above 70% isn't being honest.
Across all ethnic groups, isolating for income level, males raised without fathers commit crimes at dramatically higher rates, drop-out of school at dramatically higher rates, and are more likely to engage in violence. I grew up in a poor county that happened to be mostly Black, but with a significant population of poor whites as well. The common denominator of kids dropping out of school, or getting arrested for hitting their mom when they were 14, 15 years old wasn't race, it was absentee fathers. Incarceration rates aren't remotely high enough to explain the absent fathers in the United States. The vast, vast majority of absentee fathers are not in prison, they are just not around.
The US military developed it not as a tool to exclude, but to INCLUDE as many males in the draft as possible during World War I and after.
The determination was that anyone below 85 IQ is literally a net drag on performance in the battlefield, and is unable to add value without a quantity of supervision that is detrimental to a fighting unit.
The harsh realities of IQ go against the grain of both of the major US political parties:
The GOP myth of everyone working hard to uplift themselves simply can't apply to about 10% of the population. There is simply nothing a person born with an 85 IQ can do to succeed in the modern world without a lot of help and assistance that almost certainly needs to come from some form of collective, probably the government.
The Democratic myth is that, given enough help, and with obstacles such as racism removed, everyone can succeed. Therefore, they believe that unequal outcomes are evidence of some form of systemic discrimination. There is no level of discrimination you can remove that is going to help the 10% of the population at or below 85% succeed in the modern world. Cash payments to this population are simply not going to ever yield any form of self-sufficiency in a post-industrial economy.
It's a miserable reality that I hate to think about, and simply makes me sad. Any one of us reading this comment could have been born with this affliction, and I think we should be extremely hones when assessing how to correct this injustice of birth and give these human beings a life that is as meaningful and happy as possible. The lies we tell ourselves do them no favors.
Surely you jest. It really doesn't matter how you define success, IQ is a valid predictor of pretty much any definition of success you can think of. Income, academic achievement, you name it.
Do you really not see the issue?
He’s also served the counter argument on a plate: pick a reasonable definition of success, and find little or no correlation to IQ. You only need to agree the definition is “reasonable”, and the study is not flawed.
UncleMeat is a Zappa album title so I'm certain that others use it as a handle.
The supposition we’re exploring in this sub-thread is that AA is not actually a treatment for racism and more of a signal of virtue collectively by society. Real treatment would be to do the expensive and disruptive thing, yes.
Now, introducing any criteria which results in a different set of applicants than the top 100 necessarily lowers the bar of proficiency. It doesn't have to be affirmative action, it could be any arbitrary change in criteria. "We want just as many people named Michael as people named Jim." Well, if that wasn't the case in the original set of applicants, you're no longer getting the top 100. Affirmative action by race is no different. It's not that there is a debate here, as I said, it is that you are necessarily lowering the bar of proficiency by introducing another set of arbitrary criteria.
Maybe there were 6 Michaels and 1 Jim in the top 100. In order to balance them out, there would likely have to be some Michaels removed, some Jims added, and some people from other common names removed. Every person that was removed for a Jim from outside of the original 100 was more qualified and excluded due to the arbitrary criteria. The bar was lowered.
If this is the starting position, then it is mathematically possible for affirmative action to deliver more equitable outcomes without lowering the objective bar.
So yes, affirmative action produces suboptimal results if you believe the world is already perfectly fair, and the "losers" weren't as qualified, due to differences between groups in preferences or abilities. Alternatively, affirmative action provides a slight correction to an unfair world, if you believe that all groups are equally capable, and differences in outcomes indicate how much bias is left to overturn.
The one strategy I've heard of that doesn't do this, and isn't something any rational organization who saw no intrinsic benefit to "diversity" would already be doing, is "spending extra recruitment resources to yield good candidates of the underrepresented groups". For example, you could send 5 recruiters to all-female colleges or majority-black colleges that aren't highly ranked in CS, in the hopes of turning up as many good programmer candidates as you'd get from sending 1 recruiter to a highly-ranked CS college. That indeed does not require a lower bar—although it spends resources in a way I'd consider wasteful.
But I don't think that's what affirmative action normally means, and I'm generally leery of allowing proponents to redefine the term more broadly (that type of thing enables motte-and-bailey argumentation).
Did you have another strategy in mind?
How else can it be done?
Yes, in many cases a prestigious college degree is just a social signal. But that doesn’t materially change anything. Let’s concede for a moment that all college degrees are simply a ticket to an upper middle class lifestyle. Then that seems to imply the students receiving the degree were already essentially prepared for upper middle class lifestyle upon entrance to college. Those being thrown into the mix from underprivileged communities majorly are not. It’s even worse than the charitable interpretation whereby colleges confer essential skills to their graduates. You're just giving people a fancy suit and hoping they figure out how to use it to get a job.
I’ve experienced this first hand with the posse program. One of my closest friends in college was a posse member. It has been heart breaking to watch them struggle and regress after college. My friend group and I have tried to help, motivate, and encourage, the best we could exiting college and at various points since. We helped them get into TFA. They gave up after 6 months. We tried to get him jobs. Nothing and now they’ve essentially disappeared and rarely interface with us anymore. This person has a special wit about them, they’re bright and deserving as any of a successful life. The college ticket simply isn’t enough for this person because so much of their identity is tied to the community of people they developed in the first 18 years of life. 4 years and a degree is too little too late.
So this is the entire point: it’s incredibly naive and reeks of a search for an an easy out to sit back any say that college is the only thing that matters the challenge is simply getting people in so let’s just skip the challenge and fudge the numbers and “get them in”. I don't care if your provocative econ class taught you college is just a signaling process, that’s a rash short sighted response to an intense submission to “white” guilt. The challenge is solving the challenge. The challenge is providing resources required to hoist entire communities out of their rut so they can be held to the same standards as everyone else, the answer is not to trash our standards (as we’re literally doing by removing standardized tests from admission processes) and regress our expectations to the lowest common denominator.
Oh yea, this is what should be done.
And like many other problems, I assure you its not going to be fixed. Far too many parties prefer the status quo - including the disadvantaged kids.
I hope I am wrong.
If that was the case they wouldn't drop SAT. Fact is they want to accept people with worse objective scores, this whole discussion and article is about that fact. Instead they will use "culture fit" and "leadership potential" to discriminate against Asians and bring in more desirable minorities.
No, just that it's as close as you can get with the imperfect tools at your disposal. Even if your tools are really bad—like, if the variation in scores on your test suite is 10% ability, 90% luck—well, if that's the best tool you have for sorting by ability, then you should use it, and to the extent that you ignore its recommendations in favor of racial or other preferences, that will lower the average ability of the candidates you accept. (Unless your tool is so bad that selecting by race outperforms it—which is a very unfortunate situation, and one that should be avoided as much as possible.)
This would no longer be the example I described. This is why people who support something approximating a meritocracy are typically in favor of any efforts to remove bias, and move in a direction of blind hiring. It is disingenuous to say that this is the objective of those in favor of affirmative action, however, as color/gender blindness is not their goal at all. The example here of getting rid of the SAT is a perfect example of that.
> you believe that all groups are equally capable, and differences in outcomes indicate how much bias is left to overturn
And this is the fundamental difference. Advocates of affirmative action/CRT believe that different population outcomes can be used as a de facto post hoc rationalization that the system which produced the outcomes must be necessarily biased in favor or against the groups. This is fallacious thinking. The conclusion doesn't even follow your own premise, and your premise is simply an assertion of what you believe to be true.
"[I] believe that all groups are equally capable, therefore differences in outcomes indicate that systems are biased." This is a fallacious statement. Capability is a minor, minor portion of the equation. Interest, culture, behavior, geography, income, wealth, history... Where do these fit into your model?
Let me tell you something about hiring. I've been responsible for hiring engineers on many occasions, and still am. If I were instructed to achieve, for example, 50/50 parity between male and female engineers: I would have to hire 100% of the female engineer applicants. If I were instructed to make sure that 13% of the engineers were black (to be in line with population levels): I would have to hire 100% of the black engineer applicants.
Your de facto reasoning that the reason that engineers are overwhelmingly white/east Asian/Indian/Eastern European is that the hiring system is favored as such. The pool of applicants, however, skews even further towards this representation. Almost all companies are already trying to capture a greater proportion of other demographics, and are simply unable to do so. But in regards to sacrificing proficiency, if you understand the proportionality of the applicant pool, your argument of not sacrificing proficiency completely falls apart. It's as I said, if I were to get 50/50 female representation, I would literally have to get rid of proficiency criteria altogether and literally hire every woman on the spot. It would absolutely be a massive hit to proficiency. That isn't saying that women are less proficient at engineering.
Lastly, I'm curious if you care about this for anything else. For example, Indians are extremely over represented in medicine as compared to their population. Filipinos are extremely over represented in nursing as compared to their population. Because you believe all group are equally capable, you surely believe that a cabal of Filipino nurses and their in group preferences are responsible for maintaining the hegemony of Filipino nurse supremacy, correct?
I'm responsible for hiring engineers as well, and I don't actually think discrimination plays much of a role at this point in the pipeline; I just rarely see candidates from underrepresented groups cross my desk. From here, it looks like a supply issue upstream (whether from preferences, abilities, or bias). So in this little corner of the world, I agree that affirmative action would require compromising on proficiency. Other corners may be different.
Let’s take the pessimistic stance that society is actively working to perpetually oppress the lower class and under privileged. If so then the fact that e.g. college AA is allowed to slip by but primary school support is opposed with death threats tells me that fixing primary school education is barking up the right tree or poking the hornets nest, what have you. The real threat is actual competition, which starts in the early years.
I tend to think is less of some insidious underbelly of society working to keep people oppressed and rather a more simple: good primary schools cost money and resources and we are ultimately selfish people who signal virtue yet balk come time to face reality and fund it. But that doesn't really change the conclusion. Democratize access to good primary school education. Increase funding and dismantle broken school district “gerrymandering” of funds allocation (in many cities rich communities produce rich and desirable primary schools because funds are allocated at the neighborhood level so it just perpetuates inequality). In my opinion the most effective thing a single concerned family can do would be to move to an under privileged neighborhood and send their kids to the public school there. Force yourself to confront reality and work to better the education for all. How many upper middle class virtue signaling anti racist parents (or parents to be) do you know who go gentrify a neighborhood and then send their kids to a charter school? Yeah. That’s literally SF in a nutshell for you.
Speaking of primary, elementary level perspective…
The school in question is where I went prior to its closing. After I graduated, white families decided to close a very new, nice school because they just didn’t want their kids among black students.
Even where there is money and great support, whites just don’t want to have any funding to go to black kids without their say-so.
It will never be solved. The hate is too deep. My old neighborhood had to resort to lengthy legal proceedings to get what they already paid for.
This is why affirmative action is necessary. The whites on the board closed the school because they wanted control.
Does anyone see how totally messed up this situation is and how it highlights the reality of deeply ingrained racism? Even middle class blacks who are not poverty level and not asking for free lunches can’t get a break. They bought and paid for a modern school, watched white people run away to other communities then forced the blacks to be bussed to the white school where the whites could allocate taxes their government controlled.
Not related but interesting: This is also where Shonda Rhimes, famous writer/producer of Grey’s Anatomy, grew up.
I can only share my experience, but in my case it is literally the same people. The same organizers and leaders. There are surely people out there who support one and not the other, but I don't observe them acting. When I see the people at the school board meetings, it is the same faces opposing initiatives trying to get more kids on free-and-reduced-lunch into accelerated elementary programs and also opposing initiatives to get more kids on free-and-reduced-lunch into magnet high schools.
> How many upper middle class virtue signaling anti racist parents (or parents to be) do you know who go gentrify a neighborhood and then send their kids to a charter school?
Lots. But this isn't some proof that the activists are all liars. Again, these don't tend to be the people actually pushing for change at school board meetings.
My point about the parents sending their kids to magnet schools is that they’re kinda cancerous turds. They are actively resisting true diversity while at the same time claiming to be woke fucking anti racist saints. Fuck that attitude.
The people you are complaining about don’t show up on either side.
What is the argument from these people that show up across the board to oppose AA programs at younger levels? What are the programs? What is their goal? Just trying to get a profile on the type of people who are frustrating you.
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