

Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite - wallflower
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhardt.html?hp

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invalidOrTaken
The article title isn't very informative; you might as well say, "Elite
colleges, largely for the top." Elite how? Academically? Income? Family
connections?

The real injustice, IMO, isn't in the higher education system. It's in the
public K-12 system. I didn't attend a private high school, but I might as well
have---my parents live in an area with sky-high property values, and the high
school I attended solicits citizen donations pretty vigorously. I think we had
maybe three black kids in the school, and I'm sure our graduation rate was
over 90%.

I have a very hard time believing that Joe Inner City had a _chance_ of
getting the same secondary education I did.

I don't know what the solution is, but I'm pretty sure it starts _way_ before
college.

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hugh3
_I don't know what the solution is, but I'm pretty sure it starts way before
college_

I'd be inclined to segregate the schools. No, not by race, by IQ scores. Test
the kids at the age of ten and split 'em up into (say) five groups depending
on how well they do, and then truck 'em off to schools strategically placed to
have catchment areas spread over a range of socioeconomic areas.

The alphas would get the full-on deal, the best education that our species can
cram into seven short years. The betas would get a slightly easier set of
coursework but still be expected to be fully functional and capable of office
work. The epsilons would get remedial literacy and life skills and taught to
productively follow orders in order to make it through life without becoming a
burglar or meth addict. It may sound cruel, but is it any worse than expecting
an IQ 80 doofus to write an essay on Shakespeare?

~~~
zwieback
That's sort of how it worked in Germany when I grew up there. At age 10
everyone gets a series of tests that decides whether they go to first, second
or third tier schools. Only the first tier (9 years of high school) gets you
admission to university. The second tier is meant to shuttle you toward
vocational education, which is very good in Germany, and the third tier
basically turns you into a laborer.

There is some lateral movement between schools but it's pretty rare and in
most states the schools are physically separated.

I'm not sure what it's like now but at the time it seemed like the system
didn't really sort by IQ but much more by the class you were already in. In
principle it should be easy to move up but the reality is much different.

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hugh3
_But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than
a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. It’s pretty hard to call that
meritocracy._

Wait, isn't that _exactly_ a meritocracy? An applicant's chances of getting in
are correlated with his SAT score and not with his income?

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FaceKicker
I'd agree that the wording is pretty strange, but I would argue that if two
applicants are _exactly_ the same in every way, except that A's parents make
$40,000/year and B's parents make $500,000/year, A should be ranked above B in
terms of merit because more than likely he/she has experienced more hardship,
and been able to do just as well as B in spite of it.

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ipince
I do think that's what the author meant. I see the point, but on the other
hand, it seems extremely hard to measure and account for. Unless the
difference is abysmal, I don't think it would be right to discriminate based
on socioeconomic background either.

~~~
hugh3
Besides, in what sense is the "merit" conferred by having good genes better
than the "merit" conferred by having rich parents?

Via blind luck, person A happens to be born slightly smarter than person B,
but with poorer parents. Person B is genetically disadvantaged relative to
person A, but has a few more learning opportunities in childhood. By the time
they both reach the age of eighteen, they're performing identically on the SAT
(which is supposed to be a test of general intelligence). Why should we say
that A's unfair genetic advantage is more meritorious than B's unfair
financial advantage?

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FaceKicker
Merit isn't necessarily free of any "luck" component. I would say that a
smarter person "merits" admission over a less smart person, even though the
smarter person didn't really earn the intelligence in any way because he/she
was born with it.

If you want to get into a debate on whether intelligence gives a person merit,
you might as well ask whether being hard-working gives a person merit too,
since being hard-working probably also has a genetic component. If you're a
determinist, you could even extend this further by saying that everyone has
the exact same merit, in that nobody had any control over anything they did,
good or bad.

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rayiner
They have an odd definition of "elite" (top 1/4)... That's what, household
income in the ~$100k range for a family that has college-aged kids? That's
pretty much every household with at least one parent with a professional job
(especially on the east coast, where I'd imagine most people at Georgetown are
from).

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forkandwait
Nationally, only about 27% of the population above the age of 25 has a college
degree, which includes _all_ crummy state colleges (I can say that because I
got a degree from one, as an "adult learner" no less). So my guess is that
about 20% of the East Coast has "at least one parent" who has a professional
job. In manhattan probably 50%+, in Orange County, probably 10%. Just saying

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barry-cotter
_Several years ago, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, and two
other researchers found that top colleges gave no admissions advantage to low-
income students, despite claims to the contrary.

[...]

The result of these changes is that Amherst has a much higher share of low-
income students than almost any other elite college _

I strongly suspect that Amherst's poor people recruiting is race blind. That's
the only way they could find enough students in the US who are up to their
academic standards. It's almost certainly an excellent long-term strategy too;
the relatively poor will likely be fairly fervent in their support for the
alma mater.

In itself, this doesn't really matter, a college that takes in less than 2k
students a year won't change anything unless the model brings in money. But it
should. Taking smart people and giving them that hireable by Goldman or
McKinsey stamp, that should lead to donations.

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lefstathiou
Can someone please tell me how Ga Tech made the list (not trying to hate, I'm
from GA and my dad is a yellow jacket)?

~~~
vrikhter
Top 5 Engineering school. Surprised you even asked. Yes, I did go to GT.

Edit: GT as I remember had a large minority student body. I believe that we
graduate more african american engineers than any other school in the country.
We are also a less expensive public school.

