Equality of opportunity over outcome for me. Now Asians will be discriminated against secretly. My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
>I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
Maybe not, it feels like to me that the Overton window[0] has been sliding left. My views on freedom of speech made me a 'leftist commie' when I used them to defend South Park and Eminem now most often I'm accused being 'alt-right' by those who disagree with those same views.
A one dimensional left/right view doesn't really explain our current politics very well. Factions in both parties have strong reasons to be against freedom of speech.
While i don’t disagree on its face. That statement usually means “people should just be on my side”.
As written above; the Overton window has been moving left, and things like not prosecuting female gential mutilation in the US, straight socialism, not settling for anything less than full gun bans, open borders - things that would have got you locked up 50 years ago are being pushed by presidential candidates and congress members.
It’s moved left, and a little too far. So while I agree people with brains should be united, right now many of the balanced beliefs will get you called an alt-right Nazi.
You need a third party that takes up the middle. That allows the parties to move slowly towards the middle and shift left or right over certain issues only. Right now it is setup to move the parties apart as the choice is binary.
> not prosecuting female gential mutilation in the US, straight socialism, not settling for anything less than full gun bans, open borders
Please don't lie. There is no mainstream Congress person or presidential candidate protecting FGM, advocating for full socialism or complete open borders. Just because you disagree with them doesn't make your projections true.
Anecdotal, but I notice a lot more people clamoring about freedom of speech when it's white supremacists being affected and a lot less when it's ISIS or Al-Qaeda. I find it very hard to take them seriously because of this, despite agreeing with a lot of the sentiment.
Keep in mind that the definition of "white supremacy" has been expanded to include things like opposition to affirmative action, or support for enforcement of existing border control regulations (let along their expansion). Of course calls to censor those things are going to garner much more opposition than censoring explicit terrorist organizations.
Many people, including mainstream media outlets, friends of mine, and co-workers have labeled these positions as white supremacist. Not just identifying them as positions that white supremacists support. The set of views considered "white supremacist" is indeed expanding to include mainstream conservative views like the ones I mentioned.
I recently attended a diversity workshop at a large organization that you’d recognize where we were taught some key elements of white supremacy are things like: perfectionism, urgency, defensiveness, individualism, etc.
Being conscious of dog whistles isn't expanding the white supremacist classification. A single false positive by Twitter of all places isn't indicative of a trend.
> Being conscious of dog whistles isn't expanding the white supremacist classification.
It does when allegations of dog whistling are levied against mainstream viewpoints. Saying "build the wall" is a white supremacist dog whistle is absolutely a means of expanding white supremacy to encompass support border enforcement. Nothing about building a wall on a national border is white supremacist. White supremacists may be in favor of such a viewpoint, but that does not make the viewpoint itself white supremacist.
Accusations of dog whistling is a very cheap and effective way of stuffing words into one's opponents' mouths and many do use it to try and paint acceptable views as white supremacist.
It most certainly is. What's worse is when anonymous strangers on the internet accuse someone of being white supremacist just because they oppose reparations and affirmative action without even knowing anything else about the person. I am a brown immigrant myself (recently moved to Canada) who opposes affirmative action and reparations and just for that, I got called white supremacist, a nazi etc on reddit. Like how exactly can a dark brown person be white supremacist? Makes no sense. But the hidden identity on the internet lets people throw abhorrent insults like no tomorrow.
I’m pretty tired of people linking any sort of complaint, worry, and defense of their rights to white supremacy or whatever hate group.
Plenty of people stand up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom. It’s not all some conspiracy by hate groups to defend themselves.
Welcome to the world created by faster communication.
At a point where each issue is extremely polarizing, where we connect people around the world - blurring the local and the global - and there’s a new crazy event happening every minute around the world minute - people lose nuance and the ability to stop and compartmentalism events.
Since everything is now part of a never ending stream of outrageous actions, content consumers have adapted by looking at meta identifiers to get a grip on the world around them.
Who is speaking? What are they saying ? Oh? It matches statements used by white supremacists ? Ok, good bye.
I don’t have the time or bandwidth to invest in you.
When everything is accessible and people have only limited processing space - decisions are made on lossy fast information.
Perhaps, but there is also a cultural trend of alt-right/far right groups clamoring about free speech in response to de-platforming and being uninvited to speak at college campuses. Most contemporary American free speech protests aren't apolitical affairs where nonsectarian activists are just "standing up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom" for the sake of free speech as an ideal- they view freedom as a means to promote their ideology.
> Perhaps, but there is also a cultural trend of alt-right/far right groups clamoring about free speech in response to de-platforming and being disinvited to speak at college campuses.
For public universities, this is a breach of the first amendment no matter how heinous the speakers' viewpoints are. And for private universities it's a big blow to the institution's reputations for all but the most objectionable speakers.
> Most contemporary American free speech protests aren't apolitical affairs where nonsectarian activists are just "standing up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom" for the sake of free speech as an ideal- they view freedom as a means to promote their ideology.
I don't disagree with you. But you're drawing the wrong conclusions from this observation. If the concerns over free speech is more prevalent on one end of the political spectrum, it could easily be due to the fact that said end of the political spectrum is being censored more frequently and more aggressively. And I can't argue with that, I've seen very stark disparities in enforcement over the past several years.
> And for private universities it's a big blow to the institution's reputations for all but the most objectionable speakers.
Numerous private universities (Christian schools in particular) enforce strict student code of conduct rules that severely limit the student body's freedom of expression as to way to enforce religious or secular compliance. And it doesn't hurt their reputation but instead is an integral component of the school's identity.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I'd argue that colleges and universities should have the right to police speech and expression: they should just be upfront about it. "Our house: our rules" as they say.
Let me preface by saying I disagree with everything you say, but I still think you have the right to say it.
Universities are meant to be institutions of learning. Learning isn’t always comfortable. Some long held truths turn out to be wrong at some point. What we all think is true or right right now could completely reverse in a decade. Letting people speak especially when it’s against your morals is important for learning and understanding. Even if it’s bizarre and incoherent, if somebody believes it, we should try to understand why so that we can better educate those who were persuaded.
As an example of the rapid change in public thought and what’s acceptable, almost nobody publicly supported gay marriage a little over a decade ago. Saying you did would result in mockery, people questioning your sexual identity, people bringing up the religious history of America, etc. Now publicly opposing it is career suicide.
The student body is going to have its own set of values, some of which may challenge the prevailing norms of society or the university itself. Should a university ignore, nurture, or challenge the views of its students? I feel like, as a student, you should be allowed to pick. Because depending on the issue, or the individual, the answer may change.
For example, at one time Gen-Xers and Millennials were significantly more tolerant of homosexuality than society overall (they still are, but society has largely come around). Did universities do them a disservice by either nurturing or ignoring these views, rather than intellectually challenging their pro-gay marriage views?
> The student body is going to have its own set of values, some of which may challenge the prevailing norms of society or the university itself. Should a university ignore, nurture, or challenge the views of its students? I feel like, as a student, you should be allowed to pick. Because depending on the issue, or the individual, the answer may change.
And what happens when students cease to challenge their own views? They become accustomed to a monoculture and become adverse to views other than their own. In time, the refusal to challenge their own views morphs into hostility towards those that dare challenge those views.
> For example, at one time Gen-Xers and Millennials were significantly more tolerant of homosexuality than society overall (they still are, but society has largely come around). Did universities do them a disservice by either nurturing or ignoring these views, rather than intellectually challenging their pro-gay marriage views?
It did them a service. By being force to challenge these views, these students were prompted to developed effective arguments to refute those challenges. This better equipped them to turn around and challenge the rest of society's views on these topics.
I think there’s a difference between challenging and shutting down. Challenging should be encouraged since it (at least theoretically) forces people to have a reasonable basis for their beliefs. Students who don’t want to be challenged and just want to be correct and shut down opposing thoughts shouldn’t really be called students. They’re not seeing to broaden their horizons. If they only want to learn about their speciality topic, that’s okay, but university isn’t really the place for that. Technical and speciality schools exist to focus on small fields of learning.
> Numerous private universities (Christian schools in particular) enforce strict student code of conduct rules that severely limit the student body's freedom of expression as to way to enforce religious or secular compliance. And it doesn't hurt their reputation but instead is an integral component of the school's identity.
Perhaps you're coming from a different cultural context than, but in my circles such universities absolutely are mocked and looked down upon. Some people don't even consider applicants from BYU, and other heavily religious universities because they don't want to reward such institutions.
> I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I'd argue that colleges and universities should have the right to police speech and expression: they should just be upfront about it. "Our house: our rules" as they say.
For public universities, the First Amendment legally obligates them otherwise. For private universities they already have the right to police speech and expression. It is, as you say, their house and their rules. They don't police (or rather they are very liberal in their policing) because freedom of speech and expression are central to an effective academy. Once universities start policing heavy-handedly, or on ideological grounds people start to doubt whether the ideas voiced are genuine or whether people are censoring themselves out of fear of retaliation from the institution. This cloud of doubt hangs overall the research published by that university, and the reputation of that university suffers considerably.
> Some people don't even consider applicants from BYU, and other heavily religious universities because they don't want to reward such institutions.
That's just religious discrimination cloaked in something less intolerable: academic elitism. HBCUs probably face a similar problem: should we abolish or enforce strict racial quotes on them because there are racists who will toss a resume with Howard University on it?
> For public universities, the First Amendment legally obligates them otherwise.
This is absolutely true. But to your broader point, that freedom of expression yields greater institutional cache: how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?
> That's just religious discrimination cloaked in something less intolerable: academic elitism.
I don't necessarily agree with tossing such resumes in the garbage, but it is evidence that universities that enforce religious dogma on their students do suffer a hit to their reputation because of that.
> how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?
Not every private school is Stanford, MIT, etc. Plenty of private schools are shitty for-profit enterprises (especially online universities) that essentially scam customers out of their money. Purely on the basis of return on investment many studies also conclude that public university is better than private universities.
Also most reputable private university do respect freedom of speech and expression to a similar degree as public universities. If you factor in the reactions of students, perhaps even better. When Berkeley hosted Milo Y students rioted, smashed up cars, etc. When Stanford hosted Dinesh D'Souza it was very tame with protesters being non-disruptive. Public universities aren't immune from going off the deep end regardless of constitutional protection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cMYfxOFBBM
Again, the private schools with good reputations do behave almost as if the First Amendment applied to them. The ones that don't generally aren't reputable. So your question is based on false premise.
I think the both of you are conflating a multitude of separate topics. Private schools tend to have strong reputations because of legacy reputations, and wealthy alumni funding. Freedom of speech is unlikely to be related. Berkeley and Stanford are both examples of very famous schools with distinct (and sometimes contrasting) cultures. They do not necessarily correlate to supporting/not supporting freedom of speech. (Berkeley was home to a Free Speech Movement in the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement) Aggressive protest is part of the Cal student body culture, and the behavior of students is not reflective of the actual college administration's actions restricting or upholding free speech.
> But to your broader point, that freedom of expression yields greater institutional cache: how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?
as a way of insinuating that freedom expression is not important to institutional reputation because private schools (which aren't required to abide by the first amendment) are often very reputable, frequently moreso than public schools.
This is question loaded in false premises. Reputable private schools do support freedom of speech and expression to similar degrees as public schools. And not to mention, the claim that private schools are on aggregate better than public schools is likely untrue.
Banning religious schools is often discussed here in Sweden. It has nothing to do with discrimination. The question is if religion has any right to exist in education that society pay for, and if religious element during education is compatible with the many regulations that cover the education sector.
Education is not some kind of of enterprise free from regulations. The consequences of bad education is similar to bad health care. As I see it, let schools worry about education, political system deal with politics, legal system deal with enforcing the law, health system deal with health issues, and religious communities deal with religion. Trying to mix them together will only cause intolerance and tensions in society.
Sadly the people who mock students from private religious schools are also mocking students from historic black colleges or those who went to comminity college.
Next time you hear about this speak up and change the conversation.
Not the case, at least in my experience. I work in the San Francisco Bay Area. We recruit exclusively at Ives, the likes of Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, etc. and HBCUs and HWCUs. There's a big push to increase racial and gender diversity at least in this region. There's not much much diversity at religious colleges (>82% white, nowhere near the kind of representation we're looking for).
Before you try to diversity based on race you need to diversity more based on other factors and stop hiring from the same schools as everyone.
Who cares if you have x number from certain race groups if everyone is from the same monoculture. Why not try to hire the best from African schools.. that will give you race diversity more important cultural diversity.
While I am sure you are well intentioned in your efforts to increase diversity in the Bay Area, your comment makes me think the end result of your hiring policy is going to be diversity in everything but thought. That makes me sad.
If people try to crush speech they don’t like, and fringe groups are the only ones saying they support freedom, otherwise neutral people who are concerned about their rights are going to side with one of those groups.
The number of people siding with those groups will be more than zero. Support will grow and they’ll push their message farther and farther into extremism.
It’s not the first time this has happened. But each generation thinks they’re enlightened and extremism won’t take over again. Political extremists work with a grain of truth (“Look! They really ARE oppressing us”). If they were absolutely false nobody would support them.
People also need to get over the fact that on a business platform like Facebook Google, Reddit -- you have no rights (except those spelled out in their editable tos/privacy policy/etc...), None of these entities has ANY legal requirement to give you a platform for hate speech, and has EVERY right to ban said speech. Unless we'd rather the government take over Facebook and have full on communism, and make all these businesses public entities, etc...
I'm not getting into the hate speech debate - most of this page of comments so far is depressingly tone-deaf and insensitive - but I have to say that your argument about having no rights on websites is pretty hollow. Nobody with even a modicum of sense ever claims that their actual legal rights are being violated when they complain about being censored on a private website. Any reference to "free speech" is an appeal to shared values, an argument that they think the moderators are acting improperly in light of those shared values. The public debate is over whether platforms like Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc should be neutral marketplaces of ideas, like Greek agora, and to what extent they should be able to privately police such a large part of our public discourse. This is a legitimate topic for debate and potential public policy, even if initially such policy would only serve to provide a voice for some pretty despicable people. You pointing out that Facebook is a private company which can do whatever it wants with its own data is wholly missing the point. Nobody is even having that conversation.
Are they platforms or publishers? Your ISP doesn't police content in a meaningful way and are immune to legal claims that their service is responsible for same, similarly a newspaper is legally responsible for what it prints due to the fact they have a editor who controls what is published.
There is a selection effect going on. The algorithmic censorship of those groups also did a lot of collateral damage to regular folks in the Middle East who didn't have much of an influence or voice (limited or no English-language skills, not much connections to large media outlets or influential tech people, and located in a different part of the world - which affects organic reach of their social media posts even if they did voice their dissatisfaction with what was going on).
Tipper Gore and other Democrats lead the charge with the PMRC which created parental advisory stickers and age restriction on music. I felt like both sides were down to restrict expression in the 80's and 90's
Specifically on freedom of speech, the left and right oscillate tons based on who is feeling more authoritarian (the other axis). A small, very vocal portion of the identity-politics left is currently very authoritarian and anti freedom of speech but I think that's a specific current internet-influenced trend and not to do with a wider shift of the overton window on issues in general.
I agree with you on the internet-influenced part, but not on the latter portion of your argument. Even if the anti-free speech movement is small, the majority of "left-aligned media" do echo their beliefs. This to me does swing the overton window to the left.
A particular subgroup with its Overton window in a certain range is using the power of cancel culture, naming-and-shaming, etc. to see their standards applied universally. Do not underestimate this. The next frontier is identifying and punishing those who are "at risk" of transgressing identity-politics norms. I saw a few of them on Twitter crafting plans to pressure open source conferences to ban people who gave talks of the form "Making X Great Again" where X = JavaScript, unit testing, etc. on the grounds that such a title constituted "normalizing hate speech" and such people were at particularly high risk of violating relevant Codes of Conduct.
The people creating them shouldn't be banned, but those titles should definitely be banned because that is a terrible and uncreative joke/reference that should have been retired by the end of the 2016 presidential elections.
The window is shifting to opinions held by those who call themselves the left, which isn't necessarily the same thing as what has been traditionally considered to be leftist.
I'd describe the situation as being that the core beliefs of the political left in the United States have diverged sufficiently far from the core beliefs of liberalism (including freedom of speech) to the point that being a liberal no longer automatically implies membership in or sympathy for the left.
Not just freedom of speech, supporting trumps new tariffs would have made you a pinko commie as little as 20 years ago, protests against global trade (like the battle of Seattle) had a sizable trade union contingent. So many that consider themselves left today seem to define it in opposition to what the right is doing, not from valuing egalitarianism.
> Maybe not, it feels like to me that the Overton window[0] has been sliding left.
The Left-Right Overton Window has definitely moved Right, in that reductive to the point of uselessness, single-axis characterization of American politics. Some of Reagan's and Nixon's policies would be dismissed as "libtarded" now, as would some of W.'s.
Another Overton Window (or, more accurately, related group of Windows), describing discourse about and among the races, sexualities, gender identities, &c, have at the same time moved in a direction that is less welcoming to speech that is premised in a notion of superiority or morality about those things, especially when uttered by a person who believes that premise, and which is about the speaker's (and by implication their tribe's) own superiority, or someone else's inferiority or immorality.
The vector product of those Windows' movements is a culturally dominant polity who feels marginalized.
> My views on freedom of speech made me a 'leftist commie' when I used them to defend South Park and Eminem now most often I'm accused being 'alt-right' by those who disagree with those same views.
I think there's a meaningful difference between speech that is offensive, whatever that means, to cultural norms — especially those that are othering, or regressive, or shame-based, or whatever — and speech that is offensive, whatever that means, to individuals and populations — particularly when those individuals or populations are minorities, and have been historically subject to oppression, and which speech attempts to normalize their oppression.
Don't mistake me: Freedom of speech is for the speech one likes least, or it's for no speech at all; I want the bigots every bit as free to make their noise as I do the artists or the critics (who are often the same people), but for entirely different reasons.
Perhaps the comedian's notion of "punching up" versus "punching down" is relevant here. Perhaps also that people — on both sides — are generally just bad at disagreeing.
Based on the views you have espoused here, I would not call you a leftist commie. It sounds like freedom of speech is your number 1 concern, which would be in character for someone with views that could be considered alt-right. Maybe you are a libertarian, which could otherwise be referred to as an anarch-capatalist, but libertarianism is in no way a leftist movement.
While South Park and Eminem both 'triggered' a lot of people because of their use of obscenity, neither is leftist in any way, shape or form. South Park regularly attacks anyone who tries to change society, which is in no way a leftist mindset. As for Eminem, I can't think of a single example of left-leaning thought in any of them outside of freedom of speech.
In general I think you'd have a very hard time making the claim that the overton window is sliding to the left. Maybe the overton window is moving to the left for gender identity and sexual expression, but that is about it. The right has succeeded in moving the overton window substantially in their favor in most social and economic programs.
Leftists aren't actually oppressing anybody. We're still under the rule of the far-right in the US (a country which does not actually have a left wing by Western standards). Voting with your dollar and pointing out bigotry and inequality is not oppression.
Well, that's certainly not true. They are absolutely oppressing people. They may be oppressing people that you or even I think ought be oppressed, but that doesn't mean they're not doing it.
> We're still under the rule of the far-right in the US (a country which does not actually have a left wing by Western standards).
That's true around economic issues. It's not so true around identity politics. The political climate around those issues in the US is very much left of center.
> Voting with your dollar and pointing out bigotry and inequality is not oppression.
That kind of depends on what exactly you mean by that. Naming and shaming individuals for social transgressions based on hearsay seems pretty oppressive to me.
As a fellow Asian whose parents also sacrificed a lot, I'm sympathetic, but I would urge you to consider a couple things:
1. Like it or not, plenty of families in America have had it worse than you had, and would not find it at all impressive that you have never gone on a vacation or eaten out.
2. You should save your anger for the huge number of spots saved for legacies and athletes. Being the child of alumni means you have a 45% greater chance of getting into a college. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-m...) If you must get angry at someone, don't get angry at the people who are struggling as hard, or harder than you are--get mad at the rich assholes who quietly sail into these so-called elite institutions.
3. If you have good grades and good test scores, there are tons of good colleges you can go to. They just might not be Harvard. Is not going to Harvard worth pushing yourself to the right? Worth aligning yourself with the guy pushing a trade war with China, which is going to do wonders for the image of Asians in America? Personally, I don't think so.
4. The adversity score is designed to ensure equality of opportunity, dude. If they were capable of making a good adversity score, they would certainly take into account your family's struggles. They probably won't be able to, because these things are unquantifiable, but frankly the SAT and the whole college admissions process are bullshit anyway, and you'll be happier once you let go of your belief that because your family sacrificed a lot, the system ought to reward you. It should, but it won't, because it's a capricious and unfair monster.
Lots of great points to consider here and I'll boost number (2). I'm struggling not to say something unforgivably cynical here.... .... ...so let's say this: getting the 4.8% of Americans who are of Asian descent to spend their time crapping on the 12.7% of Americans who are black, or even better spend extra time crapping on the 6% of college students who are black and at 'good' universities, is just wonderful for letting the overrepresented white population run away with the education and the money. Divide and conquer for the win!
Your use of white is sort of shitty here- While it may reflect the truth of the demographics, whiteness is not the salient point when we're talking about legacies and 'athletes'.
The point there is the power of wealth and social connections. Thats what is unjust. Dragging race into it sort of undermines the point, and it certainly hurts the universality of the point, as other countries have different dominant class identifiers.
> frankly the SAT and the whole college admissions process are bullshit anyway
What's crazy about this whole controversy is that HN is usually skeptical towards college anyway. Even beyond the pro-Peter Thiel arguments back in the day about how college is a waste of time, nowadays there are plenty of allegations on HN about how higher ed is a bubble. About how CS, or at least programming, can be self-taught. So I don't understand why so many people here are giving College Board and the college industry any credence here.
HN is skeptical towards the substance of college. I think most would recognize that going to Harvard or Stanford opens a lot of doors, regardless of what you learn or don't.
> What's crazy about this whole controversy is that HN is usually skeptical towards college anyway.
I've always thought of them as a loud minority and, to be fair, they're not wrong: a lot of web jobs, even well paid ones, really don't require that much education or even much in the way of cognitive acuity.
The people who actually need to use their college education, the FAANG folks and people in other cutting edge tech jobs, don't bother to be vocal about it.
> Is not going to Harvard worth pushing yourself to the right? Worth aligning yourself with the guy pushing a trade war with China, which is going to do wonders for the image of Asians in America? Personally, I don't think so.
Point of fact: the Chinese had tariffs on American goods long before the “trade war.” That isn’t fair and it’s correct to call a government out on that policy. China has been called out by the WTO on numerous occasions and now, somehow Trump is wrong for agreeing with the WTO?[1] France has had high tariffs on American products for a long time, but now Trump is the bad guy? I don’t agree with any tariffs, but when other countries use tariffs, it’s only logical to retailiate.
Secondly, you seem to be suggesting that the OP should just accept not going to Harvard as fair when other people who didn’t work as hard get to go? That is just un-American and the complete opposite of a meritocracy. What do kids that have lower grades and don’t score as well get a preference to the most elite schools in the country? We are outraged when rich people bribe their way into a school, how is this any different? These lower performing students could also go to state schools just as you suggest the OP do. What gives them a right to a school for which they wouldn’t normally qualify? There is real anti-Asian discrimination at many of the Ivy League schools. This is documented and is not unlike the anti-Jew initiatives of years past. May the smartest student win — and if that results in an entirely Asian class at Harvard, so be it. It isn’t like Asians have any super-powers in academics. They’re human like the rest of us, but it might seem that their cultural emphasis on education is paying off. Instead of handicapping Asians, why not try to change the culture of non-Asians to better compete?
> Worth aligning yourself with the guy pushing a trade war with China
Is it still worth to breath when we know Hitler breathed too? This was rhetorical and I apologize for starting a little blunt. There is no singular right wing like there is no singular left wing.
As I understand it, the parent is actually not talking about aligning with Trump, but rather their thought process is getting more individualistic i.e. more right wing in a broad sense.
The ironic thing about your post is that the adversity score is just accounting for the ways in which children are denied "equality of opportunity." For example, it factors in: "the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s neighborhood." Your post confirms it--why would your dad commute four hours a day to live in a particular neighborhood unless he believed it would confer some unequal, advantageous opportunity for his kids? What about kids whose parents didn't make those sacrifices--did they have equal opportunities to you?
You go to a better school, you get a better education, you are more educated and you get a 34 on the ACT.
If you go to a crappy school and you get the same score than there's no qualitative difference between the schools and your parents skipped vacations for nothing.
But obviously the OP must believe there was value in the better school otherwise they wouldn't mention it. So they would believe they would have got a lower score in a different school, and if that's a proxy for education, then the OP must have ended up with a better education, and is also much more likely to succeed at _any_ college they go to, even if it's not Harvard.
I'm not sure what your point is. Nobody mentioned Harvard. This de-values the efforts of parents to improve their kids education. If you devalue something, you get less of it. Simple as that.
Sure. The adversity score looks at things like the crime rate of the neighborhood you grew up in. That neighborhood is (primarily) a function of two things: Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued. Some parents work really hard and pinch every penny to devote resources to their kid's education. Scoring kids based on adversity partially mitigates those efforts for the purpose of getting into college.
> Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued.
So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right? How well you are able to compete for a slot in college should depend on who your parents are?
> So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right?
Yes, for the reasons that I outlined. If you don't reward kids for their parents investment, their parents won't invest, and that will be worse for everyone.
If you spending 1 hour or 10 hours teaching your kids at night makes no difference to their life outcomes, which will you choose?
This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.
There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.
> This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.
Sure that may be true in relative terms. But at the margin, decreased reward -> decreased investment.
> There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.
That sounds like something that could be true, it just isn't. A Harvard degree is mostly about signaling. Once you are accepted to Harvard, you're nearly guaranteed to graduate (the graduation rate is 97.5%). Once you've gotten in, you're set. A huge number of jobs care more about marketing their ivy league staff than the actual skill output of that staff. You can do extremely well with zero talent and a Harvard degree. Obviously having both is better, but the Harvard degree itself confers tremendous value on anyone who has it, even if that person has no real skills or intelligence.
Now suddenly having dedicated parents and high-quality education is not a reward in itself. Why be king of a minor gold hill, if it cannot entitle you to rule a mountain, am I right?
The kid who gets a better education is still better off. High school isn't just a means to an end of going to college; you're learning lots of valuable things while you go there, that will help you for the rest of your life. And you're also being set up for better success in college because of that foundation.
To be clear then, you're not actually talking about quality of education (tutoring, robotics teams, mock trial, great teachers, enrichment activities, science museum trips, history competitions). As you say, it's "ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood". Your primary problem with this, then,is that it devalues the ability to move into rich neighborhoods.
How does the ability to move into a rich neighborhood correlate with college success? I teach math, so that would be a great place to give an example.
My point is this: parents have limited resources. They can devote those resources to things like: nice cars, fancy meals, vacations...or, they can devote them to educating their kids. Asian families notoriously prize devoting every last resource they can to educating their kids. That is a really great thing for society.
However, the adversity score policy being proposed here would blunt the impact of that resource allocation. When you blunt the return to an investment, you get less of that investment. If those same Asian families cannot improve their kids chances by making those sacrifices, then they have no reason to make those sacrifices.
You live in a better neighborhood, you get a better education, you likely have healthier food available to you and grocery stores nearby, in addition to a school that probably cares a little bit about that sort of thing. There's still drugs in high school, but they are sold by the rich kids. There's tutors and test prep centers by your school. There's a lower probability of violent crimes and gangs. Sure, your family has to shop at the thrift store, you get hand-me-downs, and you don't get to go to Subway at lunch with your friends.
Somehow, all of that is rendered worthless when somebody going to a shitty school with shitty food wins the shitty school and home life lottery and edges them out of the more prestigious school with lower test scores thanks to the adversity bump.
Ultimately, good school kid must settle for highly regarded state school and post about how unfair the system is on a website for engineers and entrepreneurs. Shitty school kid becomes rich and famous because they went to an Ivy, everybody in the VC office loves them, buys a Tesla and their single mom a mansion.
Just kidding, shitty school kid had to drop out when their mom got sick junior year.
So is it okay then to have poorly educated people in college? This incentivizes everyone moving to a negatively rated district and getting a worse education, because it wouldn't matter, according to the logic.
That's assuming they calculated their adjustments precisely. And if they didn't, then welcome to all sorts of artificial biases in the system where a few more people appointed themselves to determine the fates of many. Congrats on solving nothing at all.
Asian dad should move the family to a shitty neighborhood and spend the saved money on private tutors. Get boosted scores from the “everyone equal” has hood adjustment on top of already good scores from all the tutoring.
It's fine to recognize it. But if you say, z-score applicants by their 'adversity score' peer group, then you negate the impact of their parents efforts. If you negate their parents efforts, you make it not worthwhile for their parents to make those efforts in the first place. If you make it not worthwhile to make those efforts, they won't be made. And society as a whole will be worse off for it.
The whole point is to devalue those efforts. I thought OP wanted “equality of opportunity.” You can’t have equality of opportunity if some kids get a head start because of their parents.
In a world where the efforts of parents don't help their kids, parents won't make efforts. This will degrade the educational attainment of all kids. Most people consider this to be a bad thing.
That really depends on how much diminishing you do. Either way, at the margin, you decrease the return to parental investment. At the margin, parents will invest less.
I don't think you can ever eliminate that, short of removing kids from their parents Plato's Republic style.
Adding more rules will just create perverse incentives (e.g. parents incentivized to increase crime rate in their neighborhoods to boost their children's scores.)
I agree that you can’t equality of opportunity without the government taking over the task of raising children. But that undermines OP’s premise. If “equality of opportunity” is not an option, then “equality of outcome” should be on the table.
Because the College Board isn't doing it in a way that truly reflects the adversity each kid faced.
For example, if Alice is raised by two loving parents in a so-so neighborhood she gets a score of 50. If Bob was abused as a child, put into foster care at 10, and adopted into a good neighborhood at 14 he gets a score of 25. Due to Bob's past he is way behind in school but works hard. Bob and Alice both end up getting 1400. At a selective school its possible that because Bob his a lower adversity score his application automatically gets rejected while Alice's application gets looked at and accepted.
This is the kind of case that is possible with an "Adversity Score" that bothers me.
Because we don't want to live in a society that so strongly encourages "sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max)" and "My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving."
I'm all about parents sacrificing for their kids, but when the system is set up to push people that far something about the system is broken.
We should absolutely want to live in a society that rewards people for effort and sacrifice. If we do not reward people for doing those things, they won't do them, and you definitely don't want to live in that society.
I wonder if the opposite is true as well. That is, when theses sorts of discussions come up, I'm always asking: when is it over? When does the sacrifice stop? A person sacrifices for their kid for some nebulous better life, which their kid goes on to do for their kids...ad infinitum? However, through an evolutionary lens it make some sense: an individual doesn't have to have time to enjoy any advantage they've accrued through such previous sacrifice because evolution doesn't care if you're happy, just that you're reproducing successfully, and so far that's instilled (it's arguable) an instinctive sense to socially rise in order to obtain better access to such. So in such a sense there really would be no point of it being over (except for the extinction of the species). So why shouldn't someone in this great chain of sacrifice say no and kick their feet up and enjoy the fruits of all that sacrifice? This would explain why we (society at large and various specific social groups) treat the childless so negatively and use the term anti-natalist as a slur.
However, there is another component to it: one's advantage is always relative to others' lack of advantage. This is why equal access education will never be truly supported (no matter what people say); if all kids have the same advantage as their kids, then their kids don't actually have any advantage at all (in social terms).
I think it's just a personal choice everyone makes. How much should they sacrifice now to have more later (either personally, or inter-generationally). We all have different preferences around that, and that's ok. If someone is willing to work harder or sacrifice more, it's reasonable for them to get more reward later on for their efforts. If you prefer to enjoy the present, that's ok too.
Did you skip what I wrote? You say you're all about parents sacrificing for their kids. But why would they bother if their kids won't get any benefit from it?
Devil's advocate: do you think children who lack families that provide such advantages must necessarily "suffer" as a consequence of that lack? And conversely, why did you wait to object until this, in particular, became a consideration instead of before (when ethnicity and other factors were already considerations)?
I can’t speak for the original commenter, but lots of people did not wait to object to this.
What’s uniquely bad about this is that it doesn’t have even the facade of holistic analysis. The College Board is counting up how oppressed they think you are, and telling colleges to count your score less if you don’t have enough oppression points.
My comment was tailored specifically to be a response to the comment above it. Haven't read all of the other comments in this thread, or looked into the implementation details yet, but yes, a fundamental criticism of this action is that the SAT purports to measure "aptitude" rather than "oppression", and it's hard to immediately see how such a feature would improve the test score's accuracy with regard to the former characteristic. Another criticism is that this could increase the attack surface for "gaming the system" rather than reduce it.
Exactly. And who gets to decide how oppressed you are?
Maybe you grew up in a poor neighborhood but have incredibly supportive parents/family?
Maybe you grew up in a billionaire family but with parents who are never around because they have business to run and places to go (as they can afford to)?
And the 'secret' part of the story really really bugs me. Why don't we turn US tax code into a state secret so that rich people/business cannot try to game the system to pay less tax?
EDIT: I got downvotes. But really, I'd like to know who gets to decide how oppressed you are?
Language is probably a decent one. If there was a major language shift in your family tree within the last 500 years, you can probably count yourself as disadvantaged in a lot of ways. This includes Africans, indigenous people, but also people from countries where a central version of their language spread from the capital out, although not as bad of a case.
If your Asian parents immigrated and sacrificed hard for you, but still speak the language that their grandparents and their grandparents before them spoke, well, your parents sacrificed, but like, people go through shit. White people, black people, Asians, all types of people get exploited into nothingness. Into being not even human.
>Language is probably a decent one. If there was a major language shift in your family tree within the last 500 years, you can probably count yourself as disadvantaged in a lot of ways.
500yr is waaaaay too long. 100yr ago nobody in my family tree spoke English and they were all subsistence farming on a different continent. Every relative I know is decently prosperous. Some people make more of their lives than others but nobody is disadvantaged.
I have a friend who's grandparents had everything taken by the Japanese, then again by the communists, moved somewhere they couldn't even speak the language (they got called crazy but they got the last laugh when everyone else starved) and my friend owns a house in a gentrifying city and makes six figures sitting on his butt staring at a screen. Not bad for two generations.
I knew a woman who lost a good chunk of her immediate family to violence in a south American country her mom moved with her to the US (I'm pretty sure she came to the US as a refugee) they eventually wound up in one of the "worse" cities in NJ and her mom signed her up for some educational program that somehow led to her being sent to a prep school in New England and from there she wend to college and graduated from Colombia.
Compare all of those to my girlfriend's family tree which is chock full of deadbeats. I don't know a single one who is actively engaged in working hard to move up in the world. They've been on this continent longer than the existence of the nation they reside in. Maybe they made something of themselves once upon a time but this branch of the family tree has done nothing productive.
I think whether or not you grow up in a household with parents who are driven to raise their kids well is the primary determining factor. If colleges want to know how "disadvantaged" a kid is they should be looking at the parents. Immigrants for the most part tend to be very industrious and pass that on to their children and grandchildren but it seems to diminish over the generations and the variance among individuals takes over as the determining factor. Some individuals are highly driven. Some are deadbeats.
It's not a question of deserving their suffering: it's about interfering with a standardized preparation metric for college level work to the disservice of everyone. No one is saying to make college admissions purely SAT based; applications are already multifactor composites. This is about an effort to undermine the numerically objective part of it under political pressure.
For years, there has been strong criticism of reliance on standardized tests, as there are quite a few people who "just don't test well". This extends the flawed philosophy of attempting to condense a complicated question into a single statistic to an even more complicated question. My parents worked very hard to get me into a good school. I was one of the poorest in my neighborhood, and our house was one of the smallest. The college board did not have access to my parents' actual incomes.
To answer your question, I think many will suffer, though they must not necessarily. I would have objected long before; ethnicity should never be a consideration. Why? Because people are not statistics. When thinking on statistics, you can't use them to judge one individual case, only to make predictions about a population. That means while these predictions or introduced biases are generally true, some people get screwed. We, as a society, are set up to work differently. Look at our justice system: a very high burden of proof means that we believe it better for ten guilty men to walk free than for one to go to jail. I would argue the same premise applies here: it is better for ten people to judged without race (though availability of opportunity can be a consideration) and result in a somewhat unfair distribution than for one unprivileged person to be kept out of college because he's the wrong race. In other words, I would rather we don't tinker with the ratio based on race than for one poor white kid out of Appalachia to have his score "adjusted" down and his application turned down.
I guess both are unjust, but one has injustice as the result of intervention, and the other has injustice as the result of non-intervention.
There was a skit by a comedian years ago called "Modern Educayshun", which predicted this almost exactly. That was comedy then.
> Devil's advocate: do you think children who lack families that provide such advantages must necessarily "suffer" as a consequence of that lack?
As for me, of course not. I don't want other kids to suffer. And I'm sure it's the same for everyone else.
But why should I or my children who did the right things (study, sacrifice, etc) suffer because some faceless bureaucrats gets to decide who get an advantage via a 'secret' score?
This to me seems like it IS opportunity over outcome though. If you have two people who are equally hard working and one grows up in a disadvantaged environment, the latter going to score lower.
My parents sacrificed a lot so I could go to a good school. It was completely obvious to see that not that hard working people at my school would do much better than extremely hard working people from poorer districts.
The thing is, I imagine the people who worked harder but scored lower would probably fare better if given equal opportunity but they aren't.
> My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years (literally ate out 5x max) to afford to live in a good school district shouldn’t penalize us. My dad commuted 4 hours daily instead of moving...I’m getting pushed further and further to the right
If implemented correctly (and that's a big if) this should just make it so parents don't have to go through those sacrifices. Isn't that a good thing?
Strong disagreement from me here. I believe that encouraging parents to invest in their children's growth is a good thing. Removing/reducing the benefit of this investment in the child is the kind of perverse incentive that's probably bad for society as a whole.
Simply put, parents are now forced to weigh the comparative benefit of a high-end university education over the child's development. I'm betting that diminishing returns on development investment will at some point encourage investment in gaming the adversity score instead.
> I believe that encouraging parents to invest in their children's growth is a good thing.
No disagreement from me there. However, I would prefer if a child's outcome were not so dependent on how willing their parents are to make sacrifices.
> Simply put, parents are now forced to weigh the comparative benefit of a high-end university education over the child's development. I'm betting that diminishing returns on development investment will at some point encourage investment in gaming the adversity score instead.
I'd argue the current system already does this. Placing such a high emphasis on scores just makes it so that parents are strongly encouraged to put their children in SAT/AP prep scores while ignoring other things that would likely be much more important.
I went to a school full of wealthy students. Almost all of them took prep classes to get really high scores.
As far as I could tell, there was absolutely no instance of people learning for the sake of learning and little no to interest in doing something for the sake of a child's development.
The more I reflect on your comment the more obvious to me it is that the situation is ultra urgent.
Somebody needs to get a class action going asap, tomorrow.
Its so so true that so many Asian families have made massive financial and personal sacrifices in the hope to provide their children the best opportunities possible. This is clearly protected activity under the founding documents of our nation, pursuing life, liberty and happiness for themselves and their children through education.
I can’t imagine the sinking feeling running through so many of those incredibly honest and hardworking families tonight. Imagine you saved everything, lived in the smallest apartment possible barely in the good school zone, spent extra money on tutors and extra circulars and your high school senior or junior learns all his or her effort all the family’s effort they want to cancel out.
It’s a blatant attempt to punish Asian families for believing in America.
There's going to be a lot of Veterans that feel the same way. Imagine serving in the military for a while, saving up money to move somewhere where your kids will have good schools and good quality of life, getting a good job after working your ass off to jump careers, and then have the College Board tell you that this will disadvantage your child when applying to college. This is insane.
Also Asian myself. There has never really been a place for us on either side of the political spectrum. The left does not treat us as they do with other minorities, so they don't care about screwing us over while the right generally only uses us to pretend that they care about minorities to appeal to centrists/other.
While the right's policies may benefit us a bit, culturally the right will be just as happy to screw us to benefit themselves/their majority constituents when the time comes.
Most Asians I know are very well educated and doing well. I bet they are probably much better off compared to other minorities in the US. When I was doing PhD 90% of my classmates were Chinese. I think it is a bit of a stretch to to say Asians are completely getting screwed in the US.
That's exactly what I mean though, your conclusion that Asians are better off than other minorities just because you saw a bunch of Asians in your elite college (who were most likely foreigners coming to study abroad anyway and not American citizens) is justification the left uses to disregard us lesser Asians in lower economic classes.
Pertinent to TFA, if this adversity score weighs economic factors more heavily than racial ones, then it might actually be more beneficial to Asian Americans than previous affirmative action implementations.
Same goes for every single place I worked at. Asians are by far the most prominent minority group. What should I base my argument on? Your experience? Why dont you counter argue with facts and hard statistics to disprove me?
From the article:
"The score will be calculated using 15 factors, including the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s neighborhood."
So no, it doesn't account for you to secretly discriminate against you. What it does do, for the penalization part, is that the schools that are in affluent neighborhoods have access to much better resources than ones from Compton or Watts.
To me, a kid from Compton who scores 1500 on the SAT far outweighs someone from Palo Alto High who also scores 1500 because of all the resources the latter received to be able to reach it.
Moving is orthogonal to the problem, except that the district could be brutally hard for some kids.
Also, imagine the other folks in your neighborhood who got literally everything. Driving to school in a Maserati and spending for 4 different tutors over the course of 12 years.
Who is more deserving? You, who scored 1500, or him, who scored 1500? I sure hope you don't say, "it should equal!"
I dated a girl once whose family had a ton of money - think billions. She lived in the ritziest of neighborhoods, went to the best private schools, and had private tutors galore. I was a middle class income kid from a middle class neighborhood. She however, was also unfortunate enough to have early onset M.S. and could not sit comfortably for a very long, no matter how many tutors you gave her, and extra time couldn't overcome the fatigue. If she and I both got the same score, who is more deserving of admiration? I hope you don't say me, because you'd be wrong. The so-called "adversity score" would never capture her private medical struggle.
I gotta say, people in this discussion are acting as if suddenly colleges will totally forget that they need to admit for the lacrosse team and the rowing team and make sure they get the legacy admits in etc. That will not happen. Those people make money for the college. People who pay full tuition will always statistically have an advantage. You know how I know? I have done admissions scoring for higher ed! I don't decide who gets in, I just read all the letters of rec and the personal statements and look at the transcripts and send in an Excel spreadsheet.
Of course a single numerical score never captures the complexity of students. I really don't understand why HNers think this will make or break admissions. Any college has to meet their budget first. People who pay full price fill those spots. Everyone else is fighting for the remaining spots. Ok, maybe I answered my own question: HNers realize that despite being moderately successful in our current regime, they can't afford to pay full price and so their kids will be scrapping it out with every poor kid who busted their ass too, and it's just less compelling to hear "son/daughter of software engineer from well-off neighborhood, with robotics team experience and high SAT score and hours of tutoring and an internship at a local biotech firm" than "son/daughter of welfare mom, with robotics team experience and high SAT score and an internship at a local bank"....
Rich people can have crappy lives. No doubt about it. But they sure do help a small liberal arts college meet their budget goals more easily anyway.
> The so-called "adversity score" would never capture her private medical struggle.
She's probably gonna mention the MS in her essay, though.
There are always edge cases. That we can't perfectly capture each and every one of them doesn't mean some data on common advantages/disadvantages can't be useful.
(Plus, there's going to be a number of more conventionally disadvantaged kids with MS, too, who don't have the billions of dollars to lean on.)
Imagine you are about to undergo a major surgery. Would you rather get operated by a surgeon that graduated from the medical school with A+, or by someone with a B who got the job instead because they came from a poorer neighborhood?
Q: What do you call the person who graduated last in their class in medical school?
A: Doctor.
Sure, I'd probably prefer the higher performing doctor in this hypothetical scenario, but at the same time, it feels very much artificial (maybe a false dichotomy?). Sure, you always want the best for everything -- that's what "the best" means! Reality is that there are always going to be B students operating on people. If I were to propose my own false dichotomy, I might ask whether you prefer the B student who got tutored to pass the SAT, or one who self studied?
I am merely trying to simplify a complex matter to make it easier to understand/debate.
I would say, in reality indeed a certain % of surgeons would be the B students. The problem is that some social policies would increase this %, while others would decrease it. In my opinion, giving points for anything other than raw measurable performance would increase this %.
To answer your question, I would prefer a person who is passionate about what they are doing and capable of thinking outside the box. However, unfortunately, it's not something that could be easily formalized. Sure, self-taught students would likely be better motivated than tutored ones, however once you begin counting it as a part of the score, people would start gaming the system. Someone would lie about not being tutored. Someone else would actually skip taking private lessons and will miss out on learning something important, because doing so would give them a better score. A much better solution, IMO, would be to point out and quantify the traits and skills the self-taught people show, and include them in the test, giving everyone a chance to learn and practice them.
> Would you rather get operated by a surgeon that graduated from the medical school with A+, or by someone with a B who got the job instead because they came from a poorer neighborhood?
Ben Carson is an apparent moron, who thinks the pyramids were for grain storage. He'd fail a history course. He's also apparently a phenomenal brain surgeon.
Clinical skills and raw academic scores can be wildly disparate in a single person. Frankly, if I were picking a surgeon, I'd look for the one who enjoys tinkering with electronics and engines in their spare time.
Just to get this right - to get a better SAT adversity score for their children, parents should ideally quit their job, survive on tax-payer welfare and live in a high-crime area ? This is now fully incentivized right ?
I don’t see why children should have their opportunity limited by what their parents can or can’t do (or even refuse to do). How is that meritocracy or equality of opportunity? That’s just old fashion inheritance.
You are absolutely right. If playing some sports that only rich can afford makes you more likely to get into an ivy league school then may be hardships should too.
Your intact family sticking together for your childhood and making a sustained sacrifice for your benefit already represents several awesome advantages many, many, many kids will never enjoy.
You didn't eat out much so... home cooked meals most nights?
You lived in a good school district?
You had parents and/or other family as a support structure for 12 years?
You had a dad?
What is with this sentiment that we have to try to make people ashamed for doing things the right way and working hard?
Be proud of what you have accomplished. Fuck the people that want to tear you down because there's some poor wretch that "deserves" a shot more than you do.
OP is saying that their family sacrificed a lot to live and attend school in a geographic area that was probably catering towards wealthier people. The new system will be unfair for people like OP as their socioeconomic adjusted scores now get bunched together with the average wealthy student in the area despite not having actually been well off. Perhaps the student had to work after school at her mother's laundromat all day despite living in a good neighborhood and attending a decent school. Not only does this "adversity" not get reflected but basically the effort part of the student (and their family) is getting lost with this new system.
Honestly, given that the sole purpose of the SAT is to apply to college, which get tons more information about the test taker/applicant than College Board, hopefully this gets ignored and college admissions make their own judgements on "adversity" versus the SAT's simplistic, reductionist view of quantifying it... Admissions should and will have full ability and better info to do a much better job at this. Indeed, the Ivies do seem to take these things into serious account based on the stats they release every year on new admits.
Also, the cynic in me thinks this is more of a way to make up for the losing market share to the ACT and attract more test takers away from the ACT that would benefit from this adversity scoring system.
In the zero sum game of admissions, boosting someone else for their poor location/school impacts those who sacrificed to get score better without the boost.
A poor asian community that sends their kids to after school schools and does very well as a whole will suddenly fight themselves without the boost that others at that economic level might have.
All theoretical at this point I guess. I would prefer to let this play out a little bit more rather than race based quotas/scholarships which more often than not seem to go to kids with the same good backgrounds who just happen to be minorities.
> A poor asian community that sends their kids to after school schools and does very well as a whole will suddenly fight themselves without the boost that others at that economic level might have.
They'll also be punished for having established a low-crime neighborhood and learning english, since crime level and english as second language are also factors in the adversity score.
Of course, no single one of them is entirely responsible for their parents and community teaching them english, or for the low amount of crime. Because those are results of collective instead of individual effort, they're not labeled as laudable accomplishments, but as shameful privileges.
As I understand, there is no 'out-weighing' - holding other factors constant, their adversity score would be even higher if their neighborhood had more crime, or spoke worse english.
Exactly, Facebook and a few others got in trouble because advertisers could set geographic criteria which translated quite neatly to race demographics.
The fact is that different ethnic groups don't seem to mix organically unless they are all quite wealthy, at which point they have more in common with their socioeconomic class than with their ethnicity.
>The fact is that different ethnic groups don't seem to mix organically unless they are all quite wealthy, at which point they have more in common with their socioeconomic class than with their ethnicity.
That goes both ways. If you've got a group of mostly upper middle class whites, Asians and Indians (i.e. your average tech company) the poor whites are going to hand out with the blacks, Mexicans and eastern Europeans. Not having much in common with the majority group is the trait that ties the minority group together.
That’s an impressive claim. Source? I can think of a half dozen things that probably correlate as strongly with race. For example, what you ate for breakfast this morning.
One issue with discriminatory initiatives like this one is that they invite corruption. Given human nature, the invitation will be readily answered and then some. Triple so if the procedure is secret.
Well, no dog in this race obviously, but doesn't that mean that instead of penalizing you for your parents' good character, we penalize poor rural and urban kids for their parents' bad character?
Not exactly. This adversity score penalizes people who good character (insofar as making sacrifices to provide better education opportunity for ones' kids is good character).
Family A makes $X and goes through significant sacrifices (e.g. commuting 4 hours) to live in a wealthy neighborhood with good schools.
Family B makes the same $X and lives a leisurely live in a cheap neighborhood with bad schools.
Which should have a better chance of succeeding? This adversity score says family B deserves a bonus over family A.
It seems you haven't spent much time in a "cheap neighborhood with bad schools." I can assure you that no one there is making $X. In my city, the average household income is $38k; the state average is $74k. Almost all people, including poor people, make sacrifices and want what is best for their kids.
You're missing the point. The original comment in this chain comes from someone whose family made sacrifices in order to live in an area with good educational opportunities. This 'Adversity Score' would penalize them for making that sacrifice. Between two families with identical incomes, the one that chooses to curb luxuries to live in a place with a better school district would be penalized for that choice. The fact that good school districts tend to be populated by people with higher incomes is largely tangential to the point at hand.
> Almost all people, including poor people, make sacrifices and want what is best for their kids.
I don't doubt that people of all income levels want their kids to succeed. But there definitely are differences in behavior between demographics. The wealthier people are the more likely they are to use test prep across all demographics, but Asians are more likely to do so regardless of income. Asians also spend more than twice as much time studying outside of class than any other race [1]. There are differences in how much emphasis is put on education, this cannot be denied.
Yeah, but if you're doing all that, and you're landing between 34 and 36? I mean, let's be frank, Stanford is not looking at you if you're lower than 33. (Unless you have a wicked 3 point shot. Or you're a genius on the piano or something.) So, yeah, you did all that test prep, and end up scoring about the same as some local yokel from Angleton, TX who took the test cold? Or some broke kid from Chicago who took the test cold?
Sure, the Angleton guy's parents may be strung out on opioids or whatever, but I gotta be honest, I'm just not seeing why Stanford takes a chance on you as opposed to just giving it to one of the two kids who've proven they can perform at a high level academically test prep or no test prep?
> Yeah, but if you're doing all that, and you're landing between 34 and 36? I mean, let's be frank, Stanford is not looking at you if you're lower than 33. (Unless you have a wicked 3 point shot. Or you're a genius on the piano or something.) So, yeah, you did all that test prep, and end up scoring about the same as some local yokel from Angleton, TX who took the test cold? Or some broke kid from Chicago who took the test cold?
There's still a shitload of applicants between a 34 and 36. Easily more than one for every five spots. When you're talking about these universities with single digit admittance rates its not enough to just get good grades and good standardized test scores. Nine AP classes, fives on all the tests, and 4.0 GPA, and a perfect SAT score will guarantee you enough to get in the pile but you've still gotta make yourself shine like the diamond in the bush that all these schools are looking for. Having this 'Adversity Score' that's supposed to measure how much challenge you faced in life make it seem like you're an underdog that toughed it out against all the odds has the potential of being a big advantage.
> Sure, the Angleton guy's parents may be strung out on opioids or whatever, but I gotta be honest, I'm just not seeing why Stanford takes a chance on you as opposed to just giving it to one of the two kids who've proven they can perform at a high level academically test prep or no test prep?
Because not everyone believes in meritocracy. Some believe that Stanford should take bet on the guy's parents that are strung out on opioids even if he has lower test scores to advance their perception of social justice. That's just one possibility. There's also plenty of evidence to suggest that this may be a mechanism to enforce certain informal caps (like the one proven to be enforced on Asians) through geographic discrimination. Basically, a deliberately opaque (remember, this score is private and not given to the student) set of knobs and dials that can be used to achieve what normally can't be achieved legally.
As an analogy, that automatically popped to my mind when I initially heard the idea of "adversity scores", we can think about a common squad or platoon level personnel situation in the military.
Some guys win lots of trophies at shooting contests, and display impressive marksmanship down at the shooting range. But some guys can shoot at that same superhuman level in a fog, with contacts all around them, at night, and under a level of fire so high you'd probably label it "Hollywood". Well, if you get to pick and choose, the guy who can shoot at that level while under fire is obviously a superior pick for you than the show pony who shoots well at the equivalent of beauty pageants.
To me, this seems like the same kind of situation.
No one is taking a bet on anyone's parents, strung out or not. They're taking a bet on one of these kids. I posit that Stanford or SAT or whoever would be correct. The impoverished local yokel from Angleton, TX with strung out parents and a cold, unpracticed 35, is a better bet than the guy with 35 through the efforts of a ton of expensive test prep. And it's obvious that part of why he's a better bet is that he can score the 35 under much less optimal conditions than the guy with expensive test prep can.
Now you can call that difference the "adversity score". Or you can call it "performance consistency". Or you can even just call it "common sense". But it really does seem obvious to me that given two applicants, the one who performed at a high level consistently under sub-optimal conditions is a better choice.
> Some guys win lots of trophies at shooting contests, and display impressive marksmanship down at the shooting range. But some guys can shoot at that same superhuman level in a fog, with contacts all around them, at night, and under a level of fire so high you'd probably label it "Hollywood". Well, if you get to pick and choose, the guy who can shoot at that level while under fire is obviously a superior pick for you than the show pony who shoots well at the equivalent of beauty pageants. To me, this seems like the same kind of situation.
It's not. Some students apply with subpar scores, but often the majority of applicants to these universities apply with perfect or close to perfect grades and SAT scores (think 3.9+, as many AP classes as the school offers, good extracurricular, and probably a >2200 SAT or >33 ACT). It's not just about performance, there's a lot of additional character judgement and luck involved. I went to one an institution widely considered "elite" myself, and I can say firsthand that plenty of students from other universities are just as smart and can work just as effectively under pressure as my classmates. The universities themselves state that many more qualified students apply than are positions. For universities where this is legal, race absolutely comes into play as far as which applicants are selected. There are many universities that can't discriminate based on race due to legal restrictions, and it's widely suspected that this adversity score will be engineering to be strongly correlated with demographics these institutions discriminated in favor of when such discrimination was legal. A backdoor means to what is meant to be prohibited discrimination.
> No one is taking a bet on anyone's parents, strung out or not. They're taking a bet on one of these kids. I posit that Stanford or SAT or whoever would be correct. The impoverished local yokel from Angleton, TX with strung out parents and a cold, unpracticed 35, is a better bet than the guy with 35 through the efforts of a ton of expensive test prep. And it's obvious that part of why he's a better bet is that he can score the 35 under much less optimal conditions than the guy with expensive test prep can.
Yeah, but how we engineer the metric to measure how much of an "impoverished local yokel" is easily subject to abuse. The fact that these 'Adversity Socres' are kept private is highly suspicious. This comes on the heels of racial discrimination becoming more prohibited by the current government. There's strong reason to suspect that this is about circumventing the principles of equal protection of the law. And this is to mention the possibility of people gaming this system to portray themselves as enduring adversity. Wealthier people can probably better min-max this system to boost their diversity scores. Not to mention, in doing so we may be discouraging things that are demonstrated to be healthy. If this adversity score penalizes two parent households, then we're basically discouraging marriage. Even if its creation is earnest, it could easily have negative effects.
>Which should have a better chance of succeeding? This adversity score says family B deserves a bonus over family A.
No, it does not say that it deserves a bonus _over_ family A. It deserves that that circumstance (a circumstance of the parents, not the kid!) is taken into account to close the gap somewhat.
Family B gets a triple mushroom, basically, and family A a green shell.
> No, it does not say that it deserves a bonus _over_ family A. It deserves that that circumstance (a circumstance of the parents, not the kid!) is taken into account to close the gap somewhat. Family B gets a triple mushroom, basically, and family A a green shell.
Yeah, but whatever version of Mario Kart this is, it's pretty obvious how those two objects are going to stack up in terms of balance. Affirmative action has always been used for either of two purposes: to advance a left leaning view of social justice, and to enforce de-facto caps on disproportionately successful minorities. If you're an optimist you can portray this as giving groups labeled disadvantaged a better chance that they deserve (but invite criticism from those that may not believe in either how you define disadvantage, and from those that more broadly disagree with putting one's finger on the scale). If you're a pessimist you suspect that this is a way of enforcing informal caps on successful groups, namely Asians which have been demonstrated to have been subjected to such caps in the last several decades.
Obviously both are bad, but if you had to choose (and you kind of do, because admissions is zero-sum in the short term), you should incentivise good character.
I guess I was more getting at the question of how we got to the point where we're giving out college admission, based on who your parents are? And what your parents lived through?
If you want to incentivize character built through life experiences? OK, I guess. But it should have to be the life and character of the actual student that counts. Not his mom.
I grew up in a poor, dangerous neighborhood as a child. Later in my teens I lived in a wealthy suburb with collectible cars in the driveway after my father's startup succeeded.
My father was physically abusive, and child services got involved. My father's lawyers sorted things out to get the investigation to stop and drop charges if I lived somewhere else. I unfortunately went into the Troubled Teen industry (which I had definitively no reason to be in other than as part of his lawyers' story blaming me for what happened). That industry is filled with abuse.
The day I turned 18 I was pulled from there and struggled with homelessness for a year. It was extremely hard to succeed when you are homeless.
Financial aid for university is tied to your childhood guardian's social security number until you are 25, so I was a homeless person, and not eligible for any financial aid.
This is just a start. I've never broken any laws or done anything particularly wrong.
Did you ever think of my story? Apparently bureaucrats didn't.
Also, why should I need permission from some bureaucrats to study from the top degree programs? Shouldn't the goal be the opposite: to expand the best education opportunities to as many people as possible?
We have so much wealth and enormous social spending in America, and yet look at our outcomes with homelessness, poverty and suicide...
People shouldn't be viewed as financially coupled to their parents until 25. Our current system is set up to discourage people from furthering their educations, with exorbitant tuition and fees.
If you had been in the Netherlands, you'd get a stipend of ~$10k per year when enrolling in school, and other countries have similar systems. UBC in Vancouver, Canada generally pays masters students $30k a year, having had a few friends depart to Canada due to said offer.
The adversity score, as far as I can see, gives high scores to students who succeed in worse school districts. While none of the sites reporting on this bothered to link to any kind of official announcement, it looks like this may be a refinement of the tool announced here in 2016: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/pr...
From the college board's description of the tool, it weights applicant scores by the quality of their neighborhood and high school. So a disadvantaged student whose family focused on moving to a neighborhood/school where lots of students succeed is not given a high score in this analysis.
The OP had the same opportunity, but because they did the traditional things for a poorer family to encourage their students to succeed (moving to a good school district and sacrificing on the commute) they will be considered a privileged student in this analysis.
>The OP had the same opportunity, but because they did the traditional things for a poorer family to encourage their students to succeed (moving to a good school district and sacrificing on the commute) they will be considered a privileged student in this analysis.
Compared to the poor students whose parents didn't make those sacrifices, they are privileged.
How would the sacrifice be for naught? The kid is presumably smarter and harder working and better prepared for success no matter what college they go to.
But for college admissions, I don't think it is unreasonable to judge a kid for how well they did relative to the advantages they were given.
Your parents making a sacrifice isn't the same thing as you making a sacrifice.
If my dad makes a sacrifice by working 100 hours a week to buy me a Maserati, the car is definitely a privilege not something I earned. And yeah, I may have lost out on spending time with my dad, but that wasn't a choice I made, so while it cost me something it wasn't a sacrifice on my part.
For many Asian-American's their children's education is a dream that they plan out and sacrifice for so that their kin can have better opportunity than what they managed for themselves. Many are tightly knit families where children look after parents or other close family members later in life. To penalise and denigrate the efforts of such families as "privilege" is awful.
Many White, Black, and Hispanic families do the same thing. It's not denigrating that sacrifice to acknowledge that being born into cohesive, supportive family that values hard work is a privilege that many poor children do not have.
Are you truly comparing the scholarship need-based policies of one wealthy, private college to a fundamental change in the Scholastic Assessment Test used nation wide ? You have a choice to apply to Harvard - there is very little choice apart from SAT/ACT for higher education in the states.
Are you avoiding the question? I'll rephrase it. If I give $5k dollars per year for college to every student in America whose parents make under $100k a year, am I denigrating the hard work of the parents who make more than that?
If I give $5k dollars per year, for college, to every student in America whose parents make under $100k a year, am I denigrating the hard work of the parents who make more than that?
No, you certainly are not. But this is completely different from adding a hidden adversity score to the SAT. Your proposal is equality of opportunity to earn merit. The other proposal is manipulation of outcome to negate merit.
Equal opportunity vs equal outcome is just a matter of perspective. If we take the desired outcome as can complete college then both proposals are attempting to provide equal opportunity.
Declaring that one denigrates people while the other doesn't based solely on outcome vs opportunity requires arbitrarily picking an observation point that supports your view.
From any remotely objective view-point, a policy that chooses to add a hidden adversity score based on poverty, single-parenting and perceived hardship to a test that is designed as a measure of your scholastic ability is most certainly denigrating to folks who have chosen to lift themselves out of that adversity through experience of great adversity!
A policy that gives 5K to low-income families to allow their children to compete effectively on the SAT is not denigrating.
I firmly believe that if you pose this question to the world, a near complete majority of people will rule the latter is fair, the former is not. There is no arbitrary pick of an observation point here. These are two completely different policies.
And the first sentence is strange. If equal opportunity versus equal outcome is a merely a matter of perspective, then you can draw your lines even further! After all, whatever effects poverty and weaker education had on students in their ability to perform on the SAT certainly won’t have disappeared once they stroll across the campus green!
You can contribute the hidden adversity scores to course grades, contribute it to graduate honors, contribute it further to employment opportunity and promotion. You can draw your line at retirement and benefits if equal opportunity vs equal outcome is merely a matter of perspective.
Yes, of course you can because the distinction is arbitrary. What people decide to think of as outcome vs opportunity tends to reflect the distinction that benefits them the most.
Even the definition of merit and earned achievement is largely arbitrary. I'm successful because of the way I was created and raised. It's not a personal accomplishment.
Hard work should be rewarded because it's a basically useful for society to do so, not because it's some kind of absolute moral imperative.
To the extent that this proposal ceases to award hard work, from a societal perspective, it's gone too far. However it doesn't come close to doing that.
Looking at the metrics they're using, the only likely widescale impact on behavior is that people are less likely to move to rich neighborhoods with high scoring schools. I don't see this as a problem.
I agree, but do we really want to disincentivise parents sacrificing for their children's education? I'm fine with taxing Maseratis at whatever rate, not so fine with this.
For society as a whole I don't think it is particularly beneficial to encourage people to move to rich neighborhoods/better school districts. The other factors are so far removed from most individual's control that I don't think we'll see much of an impact on behavior.
Sometimes it's hard to see the second order effects of our actions, but it seems pretty clear cut how society will be affected if you punish people willing to invest in their childrens' education.
They are imperfect phrases, but generally an equality of opportunity in this case refers to no matter what you look like, what your parents do, how much money you have, if you get a SAT score and GPA above a threshold, you get accepted into the school.
Whereas equality of outcome would focus more on who gets in even if it means treating people differently based on what they look look, how much money they have, where they live, etc.
That's part of it. But even when adjusting for IQ, parental income is highly correlated with success--SAT scores, college admission, lifetime income--however you want to measure it.
The adversity score is basically an acknowledgment of the fact that there is no equality of opportunity, and moreover that it’s just never going to happen on any reasonable timescale, in the US. This is an attempt to correct for the inequality of opportunity that continues to exist and, although almost certainly imperfect, I think it’s completely reasonable.
The hard work of your parents for you to attend a better school have nothing to do with your potential.
You were fortunate, not everybody was.
You might also consider that the great sacrifices your parents made to place you in a certain environment robbed you of an education others less academically focused learned well. And that some of those skills have value.
The issue with 'equality of opportunity' is it barely exists and only for the group of people in nearly exact economic statuses in the same area. So many things in the environment and schooling set poorer people back from day 1 be it environmental pollution, noise pollution, or older poorly funded schools (given how much extra funding schools can get from a combination of property tax revenue and just fundraising from parents), the list goes on.
Colleges have limited ability to help with those factors so they apply weights where they can. Hell even the SAT itself has a pretty regressive impact because most colleges will let you submit your highest score from multiple tests, I got 2 800s but it took 2 tests (not counting a couple PSATs I got various times) to get that a chance a poorer person is much less likely to have.
> The issue with 'equality of opportunity' is it barely exists ... Colleges have limited ability to help with those factors
I think you summed up the problem quite well and acknowledged that colleges aren't in much of a position to solve it, but seem happy with a solution that ignores the problem. A much more effective effort would be to solve the problem and ensure that there is equality of opportunity as much as possible, like eliminating your postcode determining your quality of schooling.
Don't forget that not everyone is college bound, those that don't get help from the college will still have a poor education, will still live a poor community and will still have another generation of kids facing the same issues.
Ok, here's a question for you. You like equality of opportunity. Presumably you agree that the SAT (as-is) does not provide that, in light of (eg) people that can't afford to retake the test and get a higher score. So, here's the question: would you support an "accurate" adversity score? One that, say, was assigned by an all-knowing oracle?
I could consistently help even the poorest students move from below 50th percentile to 75th percentile. Moving from < 600 to mid 700s is totally doable with sufficient tutoring [1]. Even for pretty dumb students.
I think SAT/ACT are pretty good tests [1], but they're horrendously over-gamed at this point. I have very little faith in either as anything other than a demonstration of how badly the student wants to be admitted to a good school and has money for tutoring.
[1] edit: i.e., SAT/ACT are not easy to game wit short-term coaching, but sustained tutoring can substantially increase students' performance... see thread below for further elaboration and discussion of "coaching doesn't help" studies.
Nearly all of those studies focus on short-term and test-specific interventions; i.e., "coaching", not "tutoring".
I worked with students throughout the school year with a focus on the underlying content, and only switched to "coaching" the last few weeks before the exam. For many students, I tutored them weekly or biweekly, for 1-3 hours per week, for multiple years!
NONE of the studies on the effect of coaching consider the effect of this sort of longer-term individualized instruction.
I'm willing to believe that short-term coaching only has small effects, but sustained individual instruction has a huge impact on mathematical ability. And as I explicitly said in my original post, SAT/ACT do a good job of measuring that ability.
But claiming that sustained access to individualized high-quality teaching doesn't effect performance on subject-specific tests that require nontrivial content knowledge and practice is, on face, absurd. At the very least, the studies you're citing say absolutely nothing about this sort of sustained intervention.
(Also, College Board loves amplifying those studies. I wonder why...)
> For many students, I tutored them weekly or biweekly, for 1-3 hours per week, for multiple years!
This... is a feature, not a bug. The SAT is a tool to measure educational attainment, and you boosted scores by legitimately educating students. The SAT is not a test to measure natural ability (I can't believe this needs to be said, but so many people claim that no intervention should be able to boost SAT scores, and the only logical conclusion is that they want the SAT to measure some sort of unchangeable inborn ability? Of course, I think the actual problem is that they haven't realized that if you eliminate all environmental differences, all you're left with is the genetic lottery.)
But anyway, I think this is absolutely fine. Would you expect someone who hasn't gone to high school to do well on the SATs? Then why in the world would you think legitimate education shouldn't boost SAT scores?
There's a huge spectrum between "raw ability" and SAT/ACT. A good test would measure somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. It's not impossible to do, but is really hard.
The SAT (and other standardized tests) make a lot of sense when you're comparing people who have spent more-or-less the same amount of time and money preparing. They also make sense as one component of a holistic picture, weighed appropriately.
The the true value of these tests for predicting potential is a lot less useful otherwise.
The huge problem, from a predict-success perspective, is that you can't tell the difference between:
1. a brilliant person;
2. a kind-of-smart person who's very driven; and
3. an average person with no work ethic who was forced to sit with a tutor for many hours each weekend.
> Then why in the world would you think legitimate education shouldn't boost SAT scores?
It should. That's what the SAT is for. As I've said twice now, the SAT is a well-designed test. I don't think the SAT should change. I'm just now sure how useful it is, especially as a holistic measure.
To be really concrete about this: colleges should shy away from the SAT because I won't be holding those students hands forcing them to study and custom-designing their course of study at their first job!
At some point soon after graduating college, the hand holding disappears and you sink or swim. Academic preparation helps, but work ethic and the ability to learn on your own is really important. Colleges are, or at least should be, attempting to select people who are more likely to "swim".
If I were a college admissions officer, I'd probably weigh "good enough scores to know you're not an idiot, plus a compelling demonstration of grit and work ethic" WAY over "great scores with no demonstration of independent drive".
(FWIW I think we're now completely disconnected from the actual topic of the article, since that's not what the hardship score is measuring)
Oh okay, I think we mostly agree. People ragging on the SATs and other standardized exams for being teachable is a pet peeve of mine and I overreacted.
Back to the hardship score, I just don't think that the College Board should be in this business at all. Individual colleges certainly know where an applicant is coming from, and what high school they went to, and they have a lot more additional information not available to the College Board. So they have a much better idea of what hardships the applicant went through. Furthermore, different colleges want different things from their students which would and should lead to them weighing different kinds of hardships differently. Reducing all of this to a single number based on very coarse data is exactly the opposite of what holistic admissions is supposed to achieve.
Do I necessarily agree with this score? No. But you should read Rothstein's book "The Color of Law" and the Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley and think about how these "good school districts" came about
It’s basically like golf handicapping. Imagine if pro sports gave the Oakland A’s a few extra runs per games when they played the Yankees because they have a lower payroll. That’s what this is. Except you wouldn’t know how many runs would be added to the score until the end of the season. I went to high school with many lower-middle/poor people (I was one of them,) despite identical neighborhoods, crime, income, etc.,) most Asians I know aced the SAT — some were 1st generation and arrived in the US from places like Laos and Vietnam and spoke no English when they arrived. They (like me,) didn’t have expensive private tutoring; their families just put an insane focus on education. The tiger mom stereotype is there for a reason. Many of these families worked 16+ hour days in small shops, with the entire family working. Most of these kids went to Ivy schools or for full-rides at the state schools. Yet non-Asians living on the same block barely graduated, if that. Yet the only difference was parental motivation and cultural background. These kids respected the teachers, did their homework to a high standard and didn’t roam around the neighborhood looking for trouble. And discrimination? Asian kids with little English in a mostly black and white lower class neighborhood — they got picked on relentlessly.
If parents value education, they find a way. Perhaps having a two parent, tightly knit family helps. If we want to really help future generations, we have to find ways to support and encourage two-parent families. That’s one of the biggest predictors of academic and social success and there is plenty of data to back it up. Limited income, educational level of the parents, crime ridden neighborhoods — somehow, statistically, Asians don’t seem to care, they find a way. Until we reverse many of the social policies created in the early 1970s that destroyed the two-parent family in certain communities, you’ll get more of the same results. Interestingly, black kids from two parent families perform just as well academically as does a white student from a two-parent family. All of these other “factors” are just noise. The problem is in the home, not with the tests.
> I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
No one's pushing you. If you really are a conservative, you should take responsibility for your own views and actions. Don't blame them on someone else.
I'll also note that all of the things you describe as your personal virtues that are supposedly under attack were actually things provided to you by your parents. Not accomplishments of your own. Why should someone who's parents are addicts, have mental health issues, or crippling medical issues feel like the testing is a level playing field when they didn't get those advantages?
> Which is absurd, considering it's involved in college admission process.
Your SAT score is just about the only bit of the admission process you have access to. You don't get the admissions officers' opinions on your essay, what they thought of your extracurriculars, how they perceive the reputation of your high school, what their alumni interviewers said, etc.
(Chances are you can make a pretty good guess at what the adversity score is going to be, too.)
And all that secrecy should go burn in a fire. Colleges have more impact than many government institutions, and they certainly take in a lot more government funding than many government institutions. They should be as transparent as government institutions if not more (What's the rationale against? National security?).
I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. The United States has a system of de jure discrimination against white and asian men. Moreover, there is a great deal of de facto discretization against them as well. Many people seem to think that it is "fair" and appropriate for this to be the case, but I don't think its debatable that this is the fact of the matter. I think those who support this policy should defend it honestly instead of lying about it and claiming its not the policy, when it plainly is.
An example is the federal contracting rules that specifically require that some contracts be awarded to companies that are not run by white males.
This of course is gamed. The common case for a small contractor is that a woman is officially running the business but her husband is really doing it. Large contractors subcontract out to these small contractors for no reason other than to fill quotas. It is often make-work nonsense, paying them even though there is no reason other than the quota to have them working on the project. In other words, it is government waste.
There are people who make a career out of filling these quotas.
Consider how things work if nobody games the system. Each contractor is really being operated by the claimed owner/CEO/president. If the best contractors for a government agency's needs all happen to be run by white males but other less-good contractors exist, some of those better choices need to be rejected. The people running them are hurt by not getting the contracts. The government agency is also hurt by not getting to use the best contractors, and of course this hurts the general public due to government waste.
Ah yes, the system of discrimination that nevertheless has white and asian men disproportionately over-represented in silicon valley, tech companies, and government.
It's worth noting that all of hiring is some form of discrimination. An employer is activilly discriminating against anyone one they do not hire by any number of criteria.
This is fine. Generally accepted criteria such as fitness of duty, education, relevant experience, references and criminal background are all forms of discrimination that are generally accepted forms of discrimination.
But, unacceptable forms of discrimination include race, sex, religion and sexual orientation. If you, as an employer, engage in discrimination against better qualified employees to make a quota of an arbitrary percent of these protected classes against another based upon their class status, you are, in my opinion engaged in unlawful discrimination. It is still targetted discrimination even if it's against a majority class member such as race or gender, if that's the reason for the decision.
Promoting or accepting an underqualified minority over a more qualified minority under "affirmative action" or "diversity" is systematic, institutionalized racism/sexism.
Instead, how about we stop asking or considering "what" we are and consider what we can offer beyond our race/sex/sexual orientation?
> Ah yes, the system of discrimination that nevertheless has white and asian men disproportionately over-represented in silicon valley, tech companies, and government.
Asian immigrants, many of us who grew up in poverty and other difficult circumstances, are "privileged" now?
One of these days, progressives on HN are going to wake up to find the many, many Asians in technology on the opposite side of them. We ain't "woke" and we ain't your "allies", largely because of treatment like this.
It occurs in most non-merit based social settings. 95% of all churches are 95% homogeneous. Racial groups self segregate at lunch tables. 85% of millennials don't have a single friend outside their own racial group.
In merit based settings like employement, the employer is going to be selecting for IQ so the racial demographic of the employees is irrelevant, only their productivity.
I hate to be that person, but could you maybe cite those statistics? I was willing to give a pass on 95% of churches being 95% racially homogeneous, but I'm deeply skeptical the 85% figure is true for all millennials.
So, controversial question here. Is there a racial divide by IQ then?
I'm not talking about the cause of this, whether genetic, cultural or others. But right now in the United States, is there a sizable IQ distribution difference across the various racial groups?
> Now Asians will be discriminated against secretly.
So, a separate number being added to College Board's overall package is secret discrimination against Asian students? The "adversity score," according to the article, is calculated based on 15 different factors. The two listed (relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate/poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood) are not directly tied to any one race.
I know that promoting affirmative action is tantamount to blasphemy on this site, but let's be honest here.
Standardized tests alone are really not the great equalizer that many might think. I am a Nigerian-American immigrant, but my parents were able to afford expensive, one-on-one ACT tutoring/prep, and I scored a 34, and was awarded the National Merit scholarship after SAT prep. Not everyone can say that they had the same opportunities I did.
A so-called "adversity score" doesn't have to be the end-all, be-all. If it can provide additional context to the scores students receive, then it can really give first-generation, low-income, etc. students a fair shot at competitive universities.
Besides - nobody said schools have to consider the "adversity score," anyways.
> I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
I also don't understand how a single organization making a change to its testing package, in the interest of leveling the playing field, is somehow "pushing" your political beliefs in any one direction... It's your choice whether you want to align your beliefs more closely with any side.
I did pretty well on the standardized tests in high school. If this had existed, i likely would have scored higher than average on adversity. I would be pissed to find out my score was altered in any way due to factors outside my control. If I do well on something, i want it to be from my own merits, whatever my current situation. I don't want to be pandered to because i grew up poor in a shitty neighbourhood.
Everything i learned and can do is because of my own intelligence and skill. Fuck anyone giving me points for things i didn't work for or that are outside my control. I want to be recognized for the things i can do, not because i grew up in a broken, poor family in a low income neighbourhood.
> because of my own intelligence and skill... Fuck anyone giving me points for things i didn't work for or that are outside my control...
Your "intelligence" is definitely one of those things completely outside your control. What you've done with it is at least partially under your control, but you probably weren't born with any sort of brain disorder, for example.
EDIT: adding on things like your visual appearance - race, hair color, pigmentation, height, etc - all of those are outside your control, and you generally can't control how other people initially react to those things outside your control.
You didn't control where you were born, or - at least early on - what resources you had access to. You were a victim of (or success due to) your geography, at least early on in your life.
But hey, you 'worked hard' and didn't watch as much tv as some lazy bastards who might get a $1000 scholarship because they grew up in a high-crime area, and fuck that, right?
How? I chose to learn the things i learned outside of school and to an extent the things i chose to learn in both high school and university. I didn't have to learn those things. I could have spent my time watching tv or doing other things. I know the things i know because i spent time and effort learning them.
Further, when it comes to intelligence and Nature vs Nurture it’s really both. People 15,000 years ago people had nearly identical genetics, but their society lacked the knowledge to pass a SAT level math test.
Now, making the best of your social and genetic background is up to everyone. But, assuming everything is balanced is at best willful ignorance.
you didn't choose your capacity for learning. there are people that try - much harder than you'll ever be capable of knowing - who can't do as much as you can. and it's not because of any factors they chose.
And how would such a test not work out well for you?
You would still score well, and the fact that you have extra work will still hold in good stead.
Let me turn this question that puts your self interest first.
You’ve got two people who you can hire for your team.
I turns out one guy got a lower sat score than the other.
The lower scorer is someone from the projects where people don’t go to college. He still managed it, and crunched his way through everything to get to community college.
The other chap has good parents who are highly educated and comes from a stable household.
Without a doubt, the first individual has proven a tenacity required to overcome a world of adversity.
Frankly - this is a handicap we already give people if we are made aware of their context.
The same reason people respect first responders, or people who’ve made it out of poverty are respected.
Because it IS harder, and far more fail to get out in the current environment, than those who do.
This will end up being more of a “how effective were you with the opportunities you had.” Measure than any other - and that’s provided it takes off in the first place.
Have we forgotten the purpose of universities? Groups of students once gathered in a place to attract groups of professors who can teach them thing, and those professors attracted more students, and eventually they got together and built buildings for teaching and housing for students, formed unions, and all the rest.
Why should we be shoving people who aren't capable of being the very best students into this environment? Why give them the expectation that this is what they must do to be successful? What must everyone learn from a university (including those in the Ivy League and their peers) that we expect them to all need to go, as a fundamental right, regardless of the fact that they will be displacing students who are quantifiably better-fit for this place?
Who will be the first responders if we make everyone get a four-year degree before they can start their lives?
a hypothetical person who was born an autistic savant who is a musical genius. They sold out concert halls at age 9-10, playing the hardest classical music ever written. To what degree did they “earn” their skills and their genius? At a certain point you must agree that people are born with brains that are wired better, and they had no control over that. Effort should be rewarded, but luck should not. Determining how much of someone’s success was luck vs hard work is not at all easy to determine.
Through hard work and discipline, you did the best with the hardware you were given. But don’t think for a second that you wired your own brain.
Edit: and just to clarify, I think some fuzzy new metric on a standardized test will probably never summarize whether someone “earned” their score or lucked into it. My comment here is mostly a reminder to be humble.
When it comes time to enroll in college, I want that savant to go to the best music secondary school that they want to attend. I don't care whether they were "born with it" or "earned it", but I do care that they demonstrate outstanding ability.
Not "outstanding ability, after considering factors X, Y, and Z", but simply "outstanding ability".
What is "the best school" here? It must be "the school that will best develop their particular talents", right?
Presumably you want them to go to that school so they can produce the best music possible with their abilities, for the benefit of society. The other option I see is that you might want them to go to that school because they have "earned it", but this is silly, especially considering a case where they haven't done anything, and are just naturally talented!
You now have two problems- first, one school might be excellent at training good musicians but not so great at training savants. Second...
Suppose you have one spot in a magical "savant school", which is able to develop somebody's skills better than anywhere else in the world. You'd want to assign the student who would benefit most to this spot- the one who has greatest potential.
This is NOT the student who currently writes the best music- this is the one who will write the best music after attending the school.
You don't care about ability now- you care about ability later. Predicting the latter from the former alone has an obvious flaw- training and practice improve ability.
Because of this, it's a good idea to consider measures of how much training somebody has had, in addition to their current ability, for admissions decisions.
Unfortunately, quantifying that is hard- so other metrics are used as proxies. In considering admission to an Olympic swimmer training program, for example, perhaps one might consider how early somebody learned to swim, or how often they visited a swimming pool.
The best music school here is the one that they wish to attend. They (and those who advise them) are in a far better position to evaluate the variety of factors that influence that decision than I am, as someone whose only musical instrument ability is a CD player or iPod.
Some music savants want to attend a music school that the composer or musician they most admire attended, others the one that is closest to home.
I don't understand why one would want a talented student to get preferential admission to a school because, for example, he liked the design of the campus. I only get the argument that a talented student should get admitted to a school that'll best develop those talents. The link between "you're talented" and "...so you should get to go to any school you want!" is one I don't get.
Why doesn't that lead to absurdities like a school which specifically excels at teaching "low-talent" students, churning out competent (if unexceptional) composers, still admitting talented students preferentially?
And if the savant kid happened to only see a musical instrument for the first time at 10 years old, so that when they took their music entrance exams at 11 years old their performance was very good but not quite at the same level as the other kids who had been learning for 10 years, you would just want to assess all of them on performance at that moment, and choose the kids that had been playing longer because your objective assessment is that they are better musicians.
In your autistic savant musician example, they are probably practicing obsessively every second they can manage, and may actually have earned their success. Does their hard work not count because their biology "made them do it?" I guess that's a question that cuts right to the heart of free will and applies to all of us in the end.
what if they aren't practicing every second? what if it simply comes out 100% effortlessly? how do you define "earn"? only X hours of obsessive practice? does their skill not count because they didn't put in years of 'hard work'?
Did you see the reference to 'autistic savant' up above? That was the example referenced. And even if someone does work/practice some, if the effort is minimal relative to other people ('normal' people, or what not), does it diminish the ability because they didn't "work hard" for it?
personally, I'm no savant, but as a child I really didn't have to work hard at anything in school. I was pushed up a grade, and was still at the top of that class, and bored, for years. i put in basically no effort in to any schooling for years, and was still, generally, way ahead of many other students who, looking back now, were struggling (this was in the day when students could be 'held back' to repeat a grade - I don't think that's done much today?).
i have learned plenty of skills, and some took years, and it's never ending. but some came - essentially - effortlessly (or appeared effortless relative to peers' efforts).
I do understand the initial example; and I have a story similar to yours. But you're comparing apples to oranges here: the experience of having a decent working memory and getting good grades due to schools being unable to test for real knowledge (but regurgitation of facts) and catering to the lowest common denominator, vs the ability to play a musical instrument skillfully are two very, very different problems.
My claim is that the latter is a skill that nobody is born with. Autistic savants aren't some type of magic creature that know things just by virtue of being savants. They still have to go through the process of skill acquisition. Now that process may be accelerated compared to me or you, but I disagree with your claim of proficiency with zero effort, especially with skills that have shown to require thousands of hours of deliberate practice to establish proficiency.
I think the key is in your last statement: "or appeared effortless relative to peers' efforts". It seems you found yourself in an environment which didn't sufficiently challenge you. This would only argue that you should've been pushed up to more challenging AP/honors classes. This would again have the effect of placing you in a higher standing compared to your peers. So if both you and your peers would be pushed to your true potential, it seems consistent with your statements to say your performance/output would've been superior.
So why should colleges deny you entry because of your ability to be proficient in the system they've set up?
If you stop rewarding "luck", where luck means inherent ability, then all the "lucky" people will voluntarily exile themselves into careers that are actually fun and which they can put maximum effort into, and stop working 8 to 6 designing hydroelectric power systems or writing biannual rice production forecasts or gently explaining how to write status update emails to software engineers.
Plus, to what extent is the capacity for hard work based on luck? If long hours give you clinical depression because you got 50 bad genes and experienced neglect as a child and lived in a house with lead paint, do you get sent to live in a slum with the rest of the "lazy" people?
Intelligence can be developed. I think it’s called “thinking”. Unless you disagree and have have a more thorough model of the mind as an uncontrollable and spontaneous assembly of synaptic connections in your skull?
So attractiveness adjustment score is also needed right?
Physical traits have huge correlations and almost certainly causation to wealth and success.
Tax credits for the ugly. Or maybe mandatory minor face disfigurement for the very beautiful.
Hating the rich is hate.
College board should use their zipcode model to provide free tutoring services instead of trying to punish Asian families who made sacrifices to live in better neighborhoods.
Holding down the top doesn't work, isn’t ethical and is not the same as lifting up the bottom.
You're splitting hairs. Their "score" just becomes whatever function the university uses to decide, and if they use it then their score would indeed be altered by the "adversity" score.
My university (one of the top-ranked in the world) did have some sort of adjusted scaling for the final exams. The raw results were never released. One would get a number somehow adjusted for how to the whole cohort did. So that if some exams turn out to be just too damn hart it won't wipe out everybody. But it was opaque and I really hated that!
I did good enough and then went on to do a Masters degree. There I'd get my direct scores. I really feel much better about it. I knew what I did right and what I did wrong.
I think the adjusted score in my undergrad benefited me (some exams were too damn hard!) but I still hated the system.
> My university (one of the top-ranked in the world) did have some sort of adjusted scaling for the final exams. The raw results were never released. One would get a number somehow adjusted for how to the whole cohort did
In first year university, I did a semester of Latin. For the first few weeks I was feeling very motivated; then depression hit me. I stopped going to class. What I should have done, is go see a doctor or psychologist, and got a letter saying I was depressed, and given it to the university administration, and I'm sure they would have given me some form of special consideration. But I didn't do that (it simply never occurred to me that I could do that, I wish it had.)
Anyway, since I'd missed more than half the semester of lectures and tutorials, I was thinking to myself - why bother turning up to the exam? I know I am going to fail anyway. But, I said to myself, I should go, you never know, I might somehow scrape through.
So, I sat down at the exam. I think I got the first page right. The subsequent pages, I had no idea. I sat there and waited until they let me leave early. (The university had some rule, you couldn't leave the exam early until after the first half-hour was up, or something like that.)
I waited for my results, I expected to fail. I was very surprised to find out I passed 50.0. I didn't understand how that could happen.
Next semester, I was enrolled in Latin again. I decided to drop it. But I thought, before dropping it, I should just go to the first lecture. As I was leaving at the end, the lecturer pulled me aside. He said to me, "You know you failed the exam, right?". "Yes", I replied. Then he said: "Too many students failed, and the administration told us we had to give some of them passes. We liked you, thought you were really enthusiastic at the beginning, didn't know what happened to you, and are hoping you might continue the subject, so we decided you'd be one of the lucky ones whose fail gets turned into a pass." I thanked him for his kindness, but I still dropped the subject anyway.
It was an interesting insight into just how "flexible" university marking can be.
Yeah but you had to work harder because of the traits being measured by this score and you should get credit for that, whether or not you think you should.
Sorry, but there are people who work just as hard as you and don't get as far because the deck is even more stacked against them, and this is an attempt at getting them some relief.
If a poor kid in a high crime inner city school who has very limited access to tutors or mentors scores a 1600, that's a much more impressive achievement than an affluent kid in the suburbs who took the test 3 times, had access to experts in the various fields, got 3 good meals every day, etc. getting that same score.
Just imagine what that poor kid could do if given the same resources as the rich kid...
> I know that promoting affirmative action is tantamount to blasphemy on this site, but let's be honest here.
Yes, let's be honest! I was from one of those locations where "adversity" would have benefited me. Worst school district in the state, low income, etc.
I am and I suspect will continue to be upset that the harder I work, the less benefit I receive. I pulled myself out of that situation. People in similar situations don't. I don't think everyone can, but they have an equal opportunity to. All they have to do is study or even just work hard or join the army / navy and do their 20 years.
I understand equal opportunity, but at this point we are forgoing equal opportunity and have been for a long time. By setting limits, calculating scores based on hardship, etc. We are doing the opposite of making it equal opportunity by definition.
> additional context to the scores students receive
Most people lack motivation to get out of their situation and improve, because either they are happy with it or they don't have drive. If they don't have drive, they likely wouldn't succeed anyway and they are taking the spot of someone with said drive. If they are happy - good for them. I’m sure they’d be happy to take a hand out, but they are taking someone else’s spot more deserving.
> I am and I suspect will continue to be upset that the harder I work, the less benefit I receive .
It seems logical and reasonable to give more help to those who need it more. And realistically, you're always going to be way better off by maximizing your own success (even if it means you might get less help) than by minimizing your own success and maximally relying on help. A life lived solely on assistance isn't really a pleasant one.
> It seems logical and reasonable to give more help to those who need it more.
It does, but that is because all the counter-arguments are complicated and sound mean-spirited. That approach, when tested, sometimes works out absolutely terribly.
Liberty and assuming everyone has an equal capacity to better themselves is the winning philosophy.
Helping people who need it is a lousy strategy. Giving them opportunities is a great strategy. However, the opportunity needs to be to show that they will work hard for a goal, not shoehorning them in to university. Nobody needs a degree to succeed. They need safe shelter, clear/consistent/unbiased rules, food and a system that allows accumulation of capital. A good universal level of high school education. The basic foundational things that underpin a civilised society.
> And realistically, you're always going to be way better off by maximizing your own success
Most people don't actually work that way, I don't have a statistic but based on anecdote I'd expect most people to minimise risk. People who optimise for success are quite rare.
So I'm curious, do you believe we should switch to a communist economic model as well? Allocate resources based off who "needs it more" seems to be flirting with that ideology. A life lived solely on assistance is better than a life toiled for no gain it would seem.
>If they don't have drive, they likely wouldn't succeed anyway and they are taking the spot of someone with said drive.
I promise you that I know people who, in a short few months, who burn the light out of the brightest soul.
Make them that test subject’s parent and I’ll give you a sure shot to medicority and a life of emotional issues.
Anecdote is never data. On a large enough scale of human data we see that programs that improve basic things like food, interaction with parents and teachers - all improve student outcomes.
Unsurprisingly - these are also things that better off families tend to take care off and spend their resources on.
>So, a separate number being added to College Board's overall package is secret discrimination against Asian students?
It sounds kind of like, "put a gold star on all of the Jewish applicants, and allow each reviewer to decide how to act on that information individually."
It really does not, at all. How can you equate a combination of 15 factors (at least two of which are not tied to any specific identity) to improve admissions results, with a Nazi policy that directly foreran the Holocaust, and singled out groups for mass extermination?
Regardless of the veracity of that article's data, which I do not care to check - you cannot post an article about Jewish overrepresentation in elite universities and disclaim the fact that the article was written by a Holocaust denier.
It's the gold star thing, folks. Gold star + Jewish evokes Judenstern, to use the historic name, not preschool accomplishments. It's definitely true that Harvard and other US colleges/universities discriminated against Jews under the influence of anti-Semitism, and it's also true that there were American Nazis, for instance the German-American Bund in the 1930s.
I don't think that this adversity score has anything to do with the Nazis, I have to say. It sounds like the data is publicly available financial information. So this whole little branch of HN commentary is an unnecessary diversion.
To return to the article, colleges have been giving extra points to legacy admits, children of donors, people from X region, tuba players, violists (but not violinists haha), rowers, lacrosse players, merit students, Lutherans, etc etc etc forever. I think schools should have to option to get the adversity score or not. I went to Caltech; they probably don't care and should stick to their quirky admissions as many of us 'minority' admissions found it comforting in the midst of failure to know that we were admitted on nothing but the material in the application. But other schools serve a different purpose and if they want to admit twelve poor kids by "adversity score" that's great. I have to say I read the coverage and it's just a bunch more rich parents freaking out that they don't have every single last advantage possible. Ask me in 15 years -- maybe I'll be doing the same.
There is some correlation between race, culture and outcome. In the bad old days it was thought that race was the causal variable of the 3. Now it is accepted that culture probably plays the causal role.
The classic example is Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. The Jews had a racial stereotype of being moneylenders; that stereotype didn't evolve because of a racial disparity, it evolved because Christians generally didn't charge interest. So the moneylenders were non-Christian and that correlated with being a different race.
There is evidence of a slight bias where Asian migrants sacrifice more to set up their children's educational future. Policies that cheapen the impact of sacrifice will disproportionately affect them. It may not be explicitly racist, but the outcomes will likely be delectably different in different racial groups, to the net loss of the Asians.
The stereotype evolved because Jews were forbidden by law from owning land in most of Europe and also forbidden from joining the guilds that ruled the professions. So if you can't own land and can't be a professional and also might be forced out of your home in a hurry, the game-theoretic solution is to be a moneylender. I don't think this is particularly cultural, as women in India for instance have long kept their wealth in gold for the same reason. That's why women like jewelry: if you're forbidden from having a bank account and credit and can't own your home, you need to have something you can carry away and pawn. (I mean, since the 1960s women have been allowed to open their own bank accounts in the US -- but that's within my mother's lifetime!)
> I also don't understand how a single organization making a change to its testing package, in the interest of leveling the playing field, is somehow "pushing" your political beliefs in any one direction... It's your choice whether you want to align your beliefs more closely with any side.
Leveling the outcome is NOT leveling the playing field. And by keeping the algorithm secret, it is tyranny not justice.
> So, a separate number being added to College Board's overall package is secret discrimination against Asian students? The "adversity score," according to the article, is calculated based on 15 different factors. The two listed (relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate/poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood) are not directly tied to any one race.
The powers that be do not get the benefit of the of doubt after all the shenanigans they've pulled over the past century.
No. I’m an MIT SB and Berkeley PhD and I will tell you engineers never made a living in the US until around 2000 (fiberoptics and Netscape boom). The “right” will snatch that right back.
Let the gamification begin where subpar students move into crime filled areas at least on paper and into rough schools. While paying for private SAT tutors.
There's no evidence for this -- from what the parent poster said, he probably lived in a well-off neighborhood and went to a well-off school. The article specifically says race is not a variable, so you seem to have a factual inaccuracy in your statement. Since poverty level within zip code is one of the few variables specified, and the parent poster would show less rather than more adversity in this respect, how do you justify your argument?
> Oh, do you think the right is going to improve upon the US's current system of incentivizing/forcing families to fight over/make big sacrifices for homes in the wealthiest school districts in order to give their children a half-decent shot at a good education?
Yes? Ever heard of school vouchers? The political right would love to reform the education system, from teachers unions to university professors, the entrenched interests are core Democrat voting blocs.
Interestingly, black and Hispanic people support vouchers at a slightly higher rate than white people. That is remarkable because whites overall skew heavily conservative. (Trump and Romney won white non-Hispanic voters approximately 60-40.) White liberals are the only demographic that strongly oppose school choice and vouchers.
We already have school choice for universities. You go where you want and you either pay for it or find funding from the government/charities. No one finds it weird that you're not tied to your local neighborhood for higher education.
We already have something that's not too far from school vouchers for universities, which is FAFSA. The government provides aid that you can use at any accredited institution, not just the institution into which you were geographically zoned.
Wikipedia sums it up: "the evidence to date is not sufficient to warrant recommending that vouchers be adopted on a widespread basis; however, multiple positive findings support continued exploration."
Seems pretty reasonable that we don't let people replace the entire country's educational system with this new one until the evidence in favor of it is extremely compelling.
Didn't your public school teach you not to consider Wikipedia a convincing reference for validating political opinions? Maybe you could have used some vouchers...
> Didn't your public school teach you not to consider Wikipedia a convincing reference for validating political opinions? Maybe you could have used some vouchers...
I think they were too busy teaching me that randos on the internet disputing Wikipedia's sources are definitely more reliable than Wikipedia.
Haha maybe you should wonder how many Wikipedia editor accounts I maintain. Or maybe reading, you could try that. ITT we're talking about political opinions: vouchers good, vouchers bad. No one with a multiple-digit IQ is going to find such an answer on wikipedia.
I lean to the right and I'm opposed to school vouchers. We all pay for public schools on the theory that it's a public good. Why should only people with children get to decide where resources go? All taxpayers should get equal say.
It's telling that state GOPs typically support vouchers in the name of choice, but not actual choice within the public option.
Allowing any student to enroll at any public school regardless of their home zip code would be a much more meaningful form of choice than vouchers.
Why not just let anyone in a metro area attend high school at the richest/best high school in the area?
If you can answer that question, you can pretty well predict what systemic issues would be caused by a voucher system.
I'm generally skeptical of mixed public/private education systems with partial choice and subsidies for private options. We have exactly such a system for higher education and it's a fucking disaster.
You have 80% of the story but the last 20% is important.
Why not let anyone attend any public school? Because public schools are largely funded by local taxes. So a school in an expensive neighborhood with high taxes will naturally be a magnet for everyone else who can be a free-rider (in the economic theory sense). School vouchers fix this problem by carrying revenue along with the student instead of tying it to geography.
School vouchers with dollars attached to kids is effectively "choice, as long as you can pay for it". It's the status quo of zip code based schooling access, on steroids. That's exactly the "systemic issue" I'm referring to in my original post.
The claim that school choice would improve access to quality education for students in poor-performing schools is a complete farce.
I'm not saying that our current system works well or that it's particularly just. I'm just pointing out that vouchers make the tie between wealth and educational access even more explicit and codified than it already is. A voucher system would deepen, not alleviate, the inequities in our educational system.
I suspect we're just going to disagree on "as long as you can pay for it". In a publicly voucher system a large part of your ability to pay is provided by the government. This is not the case today. Vouchers take the ~$5-10k allocated for you that is "locked up" in your zip code and allows you to spend it anywhere you want. This doesn't fully equalize ability to pay but it's a large step toward equalizing it.
Secondly it fixes incentive structures. Good schools in high-tax areas can now see inbound students from elsewhere as partially subsidizing the cost of the school, rather than being a pure cost center. Again this doesn't perfectly equalize anything but it's a step in the right direction.
Allowing low income students more freedom in how they spend their government-allocated funds mitigates the problems of wealth disparity. This is already how the university system works so assertions that it is a complete farce should also justify the abolition of the FAFSA system in exchange for federal funds that can only be used at the university nearest your home.
>Or do you just want to be entitled to the good college in exchange for the childhood your parents chose to give/were coerced into giving you?
It should generally be noted that such policies usually do not hurt the truly well-connected as much as the nouveau riche, who fought their way from poverty to a home in the suburbs only to find their investment pulled out from under them. For instance, black families were disproportionately affected by the subprime mortgage crisis. One way or another, society told these people "do this", they complied, and they face being punished for it. Not to perceive an injustice here is wilful blindness.
The policy is quite defensible, but grandparent's concerns are legitimate and do not warrant sarcasm.
Why not actually? Instead of politicized solutions one could require schools at every level to create some sort of random admission pool for some percentage of yearly admissions.
For instance, take the mean SAT of admitted students, lower it by X% and pick candidates to random pool with scores above that level.
I imagine that to many people it wouldn't be "fair" because it wouldn't bring the outcome they want. But it'd be fun to watch them argue that random system privileges XYZ group!
Equality of opportunity seems like a pipe dream to me. Are you really going to equalize socioeconomic status? Parental skills? Pollution? Proximity to opportunities? Those all determine the opportunities one has access to.
> I’m getting pushed further and further to the right.
Cycles of poverty will never end when people with the privilege of dedicated and capable parents facilitate their success feel like victims. How about some alternate suggestions for poor kids without parents like yours?
An SAT score is an assessment of how well you will do in college. It's not something you can earn or deserve. If someone does less well than you but came from a much worse school district, why shouldn't a predictor take that into account?
If this were almost any other example of adding a modifier to correct for a bias in an initial scoring system, nobody would bat an eye, and we'd be discussing specifics.
Probably something along the lines of: Without accommodation, being able to learn, participate, and demonstrate competency in a series of courses which presume a student's mastery of information presented through secondary education.
Ok. If we take that definition, is there any reason a test shouldn't consider whether a student had a very good school and learned half of what they were given, or a very poor school and learned everything they were exposed to? (a contrived case, of course)
I suspect your question has an unmarked asterisk, which is that the students end up with similar standardized test scores and GPA. For that to happen, it must be the case that a student at the good school can get good grades while learning only half the material, which seems not possible.
And so the answer is that colleges already can and should take into account % learning through GPA.
Yes similar test scores, for the GPA it might depend on how much we trust the scoring from the good school.
I was imagining that the good school presented more and better information, (perhaps more at the style and pacing of a good college classroom,) While the poor school may not have even presented all the information, or done so in a rushed way. (Focusing on that majority of students bound for community college.)
Free lunch, low-income pays no incoming tax(47% and more of them), food stamps, disabled benefits, medicare medicaid, CHIP for kids, etc etc, I'm fine so far. But AA for college admission(and jobs too these days)? followed by SAT score manipulation? this is literally pushing me to the far right side, it makes me feel hard working, sacrificing for next generation made no sense, this is getting close to robbery. what's next for me as a middle class guy?!
not really, color-based AA admission is the true racist, I'm just emphasizing merit-based results no matter what your skin color is, the equalize-every-result is going way too far.
Do you know each year how many of those AA students dropped out? I am sure we will have a solution soon, that is each college will give adversity-GPA-for-college-degrees-by-skin-color, all must be good.
But I don't want to be treated by an AA doctor myself! The richest and the poorest are rare, let the majority students shine by hard working, that's the best gift we can give them instead of cut-in-line because their skin color difference, which is truly racism.
Last, we probably should look into NBA, too few white and Asian there, how racist they are!
> The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker.
So there is no discrimination, unless this is used in a feedback loop, which maybe it is.
> "My family sacrificing vacations and eating out for 12 years"
So your family has hardship, but managed to skew things so you can have it better. If this analysis means more is done to help kids from poor backgrounds, you'd be doubly helped, one by your parents hard work, and again by the system.
Edit: This guy’s parents might have actually been through some shit. Asia was not a nice place over the last century. If he had said something like ‘my parents escaped pol pot’ or something ummmm, actually horrendous, then, I mean, that’s a hardship. And had this commenter framed it in that way, then it gives a whole other dimension to the discussion. But he didn’t.
I’m going to repeat this for anyone spoiled enough by western society to ever say this:
Hardship is relative. There's always someone who's had it harder than you. His parents sacrificed things to get him the resources he needed to succeed, is his point. They sacrificed things that the parents of other kids did not.
People are starting at different points. His parents were physically able to do what they did. If his dad had been disabled, or dead, he wouldn't have been able to commute for 4 hours. Would that make his dad less virtuous?
One thing I have to say about this SAT thing is that, there are lots lots of Asians working in SAT as statisticians, psychometricians, and analysts. There must be lots of Asians working on the project related to the 'Adversity Score', unless they intentionally exclude Asians from this project.
But we've never heard anything about internal disagreement or resistant against this stuff. This fact tells something.
I hear what you are saying, but that means you are advantaged. You had parents that cared and sacrificed and took and interest in your future. With that in mind they also probably made sure you studied and did your homework.
To be a bit blunt (and hopefully not offensive, just for example), if someone who didn't have those kind of parents and that type of situation makes the same scores as you, likely they either worked harder or have more ability.
Still I feel where you are coming from. Reverse discrimination for people who work hard is still B.S.
This is treading the line of being completely Kafkaesque. I'm having trouble following the discussion in this thread. On the one hand, lots of people are arguing that this test change is BS and will have lots of unintended consequences. Then there's others arguing, not always explicitly, that children should essentially be punished in terms of their "points", for lack of a better term, in college admissions because of their homelife. Have a mother and father that stayed together? You lose adversity points. A mom that stayed at home so dad could get promoted and afford to move the family to a better school district? You lose adversity points. A public high school with lots of AP classes? You lose adversity points. Family lives in an area with a tech boom, and thus has low vacancy rates in housing? You guessed it. No adversity points for you.
This is insane, and it's going to encourage absurd behavior meant to dupe this system - and don't kid yourself, there will be (see all the wealthy Hollywood types cheating on their kids SAT scores). There might be less nefarious antics if the College Board at least was transparent about how they calculate the score and released it after the test - but they're not. That's how you know this is a shell game, meant to give Universities an "out" for manipulating the demographics of their matriculating classes as they see fit. These incentives are wrong and unethical.
As a silver lining, maybe this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and folks will start to realize what a fraud the modern "university" is. When the fiance and I start having kids, we've already discussed how college shouldn't be the default scenario. I hope others start considering this. It is mind-boggling to think that my kid could be disadvantaged specifically because I sacrificed to make a better life than I had growing up, so we won't be playing this game.
But advantage is real. You can't list all the sacrifices your parents made while in the same breathe implying "no advantage here, this isn't fair".
The devil is in devising a fair system to determine advantage in an objective way that won't be rife with corruption and gaming the system. I highly doubt this will be possible and attempts likely will result in less fair and worse outcomes.
So policy wise, agree with OP. But from the story he tells, I think it obvious he does indeed have "advantages" many people don't and this is worth recognizing.
I'd argue that you not eating out, getting socialized, and traveling actually made you less of a well-rounded individual and you probably should be penalized for those things. Colleges need diversity. They don't need the same kind of kid replicated 10,000 times. Racquetball, violin, AP calculus does not an interesting campus make.
I would need some very heavy proof that traveling (aka vacations where you instagram breakfast with a view) and eating at restaurants makes someone a well rounded individual, not to mention someone who “adds” to an educational institute.
I would put my chips on someone who has at least proven themselves academically.
>I would put my chips on someone who has at least proven themselves academically.
everyone seems to be conflating academics with person-building in this thread.
Why don't these same people seem to have any problem with non-academic scholarships?
Here's the grand reason why it's a good idea to make schools mixing-pots : You can expose the really effective students to ideas and concepts that they may have never experienced, which they may use more constructively than other individuals.
In other words : Colleges need people that create the idea of Napster , but they also need the folks that can implement it. Both groups are only marginally effective without the other.
Similar line of philosophical questioning : 'Why do managers exist?'
We got it all wrong folks. We should be giving priority to the children of millionaires who are diverse because they had the opportunity to go on vacation every summer/winter break.
presumably due to the same reason that it's found biologically -- if you only have a hammer you'll find yourself caught with your pants down when you need to tighten a bolt.
Homogeneity can traditionally be attacked by exploiting a vector that the entire crowd is weak towards. Randomness helps to solve this problem on a macro level by varying the crowds weaknesses and strengths from individual to individual.
Now THAT is racist attitude against asian-americans (well the stereo typical asian).
So how about kids from single parent family or poor neighborhoods who cannot eat out and/or cannot travel because of lack of money? Are they less rounded kids too?
Just because you are asian and do 'Racquetball, violin, AP calculus' doesn't make one asian same as the next asian. How damn racist of you.
