

Where the Race Now Begins at Kindergarten - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/nyregion/06private.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

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rsheridan6
Coming from a part of the country where people usually just send their kids to
public schools, I find it hard to imagine how a kindergarten admissions
committee decide which students to accept. What sort of track record does a 5
year old have? Do they look at the number of papers these kids have published?
Is there a preschool version of the SAT?

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dpapathanasiou
It's all about the parents, not the child, e.g.:

" _The Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of a series of e-mails, in
which former Salomon Smith Barney analyst Jack Grubman discussed his 1999
ratings upgrade of AT &T stock. According to the WSJ, the e-mails indicate
that Grubman upgraded AT&T's stock rating from 'hold' to 'strong buy' at the
urging of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill. In return, Weill is said to have
promised to use his influence to get Grubman's daughters' admitted into the
nursery school at the 92nd Street Y. Investigators from the New York district
attorney's office, who are looking into the matter, say Grubman's twin girls
began attending the Y just weeks after Citigroup donated $1 million to the
92nd Street Y's highly regarded preschool. That school is one of a handful of
New York City preschools with reputations for sending their alumni on to the
most prestigious private elementary and high schools._"

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daniel-cussen
How much path dependence can getting into the right kindergarten have? It used
to be that obsessed parents used to sign kids up for Olympic-level athletics
that require starting young (gymnastics)[1], piano and violin. These were all
pretty marginal ways of helping their kids into college, but the redeeming
quality of this kind of gamble was the path-dependence: it was the only way of
improving the kid's odds that far out of the high school.

But elite kindergartens? Unless early education improves your IQ _permanently_
(of which I'm not entirely sure) [2], this is stupid. Is the path dependence
there?

It's probably a better idea to make sure your kid eats right, gets DHA and
creatine, works at a few skills for the ten-odd years it takes to achieve
mastery, and leave him/her alone for the most part, _because there's nothing
else you can do._ [3]

[1] Gymnastics, piano and violin are all myelin related, and myelin takes
years to configure. Swimming, on the other hand, is much less path-dependent;
you can get your muscles, blood and lungs up to spec in a few years.

[2] School improves IQ, but those improvements vanish in the late teens.

[3] Unless you went ahead and got him a Nobel prize sperm donor for a dad.
That will give him around 12 IQ points.

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Alex3917
"Is the path dependence there?"

The IQ boost is not permanent. However, schools sort children into ability
groups in first or second grade. What track your child gets put into is very
important and is fairly permanent, so if temporarily boosting your kid's IQ
got them into a good track it would be worth it. (Albeit track sorting is
usually done based on verbal ability and not IQ, but similar idea.)

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sanj
I find it unlikely that any advantages conferred by these schools have lasting
value.

Instead, I think that they are a salve for the guilt-ridden parents who don't
have time to spend on and with their kids because they're off being Masters of
the Universe. So they make up for it with money.

I say this as a parent who's cranking away at a startup and have a kid at a
day camp. I'd much rather be spending the afternoon boiling a cabbage for his
invisible ink experiment.

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ars
>I find it unlikely that any advantages conferred by these schools have
lasting value.

There is actually an advantage that lasts: the culture of intelligence.

In most public schools stupid athletes are worshiped, but smart students are
teased as geeks, and smart blacks are branded as "acting white".

That is pretty much the only thing determining if it's a good school or not,
and why it's worth it to go to a private schools that lauds intelligence.

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akd
Yes but good public schools have that too.

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henning
This phenomenon already exists in Japan and other Asian countries.

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time_management
It's too bad that most of the benzos will be off-patent by the time these kids
are in college. Otherwise, I'd move my entire net worth into pharma stocks.

There's a paradox one notices when comparing elite college admissions in 1993
vs. 2008. Admissions to top colleges are much harder to attain, but actually a
lot less meaningful. The noise in the admissions process seems to have
quintupled, due in part to the (often successful) efforts of wealthy parents
to beat the system, and the relative inability of admissions offices to detect
and counter this trend.

Top colleges are 2-3 times more selective in 2008, with acceptance rates at
the Ivies down into the single digits. At the same time, virtually every
professor at an elite college will tell you that admitted students are
noticeably worse each year, while professors at state schools notice the
students getting much better.

I blame the Common Application, which has made it easier to apply to 10+
schools, making the process noisier and, consequently, creating a lot of
anxiety on the part of students who previously had a lock on at least one top
school (and moreso, on the part of their parents). This led to a positive
feedback loop; it bolstered the admissions-gaming industry, which made the
process even noisier, which led to more anxiety... ad nauseum.

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Alex3917
Based on casual observation, I'd say the reason student quality is dropping
even as top colleges get much more competitive is probably because wealthy
kids are less likely to get into top colleges, not more. It used to be that
almost everyone who got into a top college was super wealthy, but now grades
and SAT scores matter much more. These highly credentialed kids might get
better college grades than kids merely from high-SES families, but they
generally aren't as smart and don't have the same level of critical thinking
skills. If you take classes over the summer you will notice the student
quality is much higher, for mostly the reason that the students there are the
ones with the most money instead of the best grades (since scholarships don't
cover summer classes.)

/Things you can't say

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CSchonwald
where do schools like mit and caltech fit in that continuum then?

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Alex3917
I think in general you get kids who have higher grades but less intellectual
curiosity. I don't think MIT and Caltech are any different, but I think they
seem different because we think of a good engineer as being someone who is
good at rote memorization and not as someone who is intellectually curious.
Whether this is true or not is another story.

(And there are actually studies that tie intellectual curiosity to SES. Hart &
Risley's book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young
American Children covers this very rigorously.)

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sanj
I saw exactly the opposite.

A recent issue of Harvard's alum magazine talks about how about 35% of their
undergrads going into 'finance'. I can't imagine anything less intellectual
curious -- especially at the entry level.

Just because something is more easily measurable (ie, a math or engineering
exam) does not mean it is less intellectually interesting.
<http://www.xkcd.com/451/>

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Alex3917
"I think in general you get kids who have higher grades but less intellectual
curiosity."

I meant at all top colleges, not just at MIT and Caltech. I agree with you
about Harvard.

