Merit based school admission versus discrimination against Asians and Whites

seriously people still think "merit" is an objective thing in 2020?

Meritocracy harms everyone

 

There is no such thing as pure merit.

 

As mentioned above, I don't believe there is a such thing as pure merit.

Just like you can't really judge basketball players by their PPG or QBs by their TDs, there's no one number or set of numbers you can look at and go...see, this person is a better student than this person!

Because schools are not always looking for kids that ace the SATs, that crush math tests. Sometimes schools are looking for kids that are working on several talents or kids that look like they can be future leaders.

At the end of the day, if you test well, if you're a good student, you're going to a good school. It might not be your #1 choice, but it's going to be an Ivy. So the entire argument against it is moot.

 

If it everything was just test scores and grades most of the top schools would mostly be Indian. Maybe some Chinese kids and then white kids. Do you think white people would be happy with that

 

The article doesn't seem to be arguing against meritocratic admission standards (though maybe he expands more on that in his book). Rather, it argues for expanding access to quality education and creating more well-paying jobs that depend less on a "fancy" college education. The first of those would allow for more people to be on "equal footing" to compete for admissions based on merit. The second would reduce the applicant pool to people who are actually interested in higher education for reasons beyond financial reward. Both sound good, but it's not an argument against weighing applicants according to their chances to be successful, which is what I understand "meritocracy" to mean.

 

Quite a few universities due to covid are not requiring ACT/SAT this year. This has been a growing trend (being test optional) with universities over the last few years. Studies are showing that standardized test performance is a poor indicator of future outcomes.

Without standardized tests, universities are left with HS grades (which are hard to compare between HSs) and some very subjective criteria (like community service, extra circulars, admission essays, in person interviews, etc.)

 

Meritocracy, in this stage of capitalism, effectively = aristocracy. It's a measure of how rich your parents are.

There's no such thing as a true "meritocracy" - whatever metric you use for merit - with the level of inequality we currently have, it's always going to be strongly correlated with wealth.

If that's your thing, to have some true meritocracy, you need a punitive level of taxation to level the playing field - but honestly, that seems like a lot of work for something that will be gamed or hacked eventually anyway.

I say skip that step, bring in the 10 hour work week/UBI and let machines do everything. YOu and I can paint pictures or do whatever we want to do with our lives.

 

Maybe a better a tradeoff than merit versus AA would be preventing all universities from admitting legacy students versus the regular admissions process for everybody else.

As point of fact ...

Harvard's Class of 2022 is made up of over 36% legacy students.
​

 

This is why Asians can’t have nice things.



Do you think Harvard would rather have one Barack Obama or one thousand doctors as alums? If you were running a school, would you rather have one Barack Obama or one thousand doctors as alums?

But Asians (especially) live in the myopic world of GPAs and SATs.

 

I used to be a merit supporter, but with the larger challenges faced by folks lacking funds, I am in favor of a combination system....and I don't understand why a STATE sponsored school can be picky, I mean OUR tax dollars pay for that school.....they should be much easier to get into...than private schools.

DD

 

George W. Bush, a legacy admission, is the 43rd President of the United States.

Can you name the other 1000 non-legacy alums who are now (hating being) doctors?

Plebeians have no idea what “legacy” really means. I thought people would have wised up after seeing Ivy-educated parents throwing around $250K-$1M to get their bumbling brats into ****ing USC, but I guess for the good of the common folks and ruling class alike, folks paid no mind and the illusion remains intact.

Here’s a hint on how this world works: the blue blood schools exist to pad legacies’ resume by letting in the 1000 future doctors, not the other way around.

 

Good topic for the D&D
The percentile rule appears fair . However
If you went to any college that did this, the kids who were at an lower performing high school did much worse than the kids at the higher rated schools.
It goes back to the school district

 

It’s a better system than California. Cal Berkeley and UCLA are way harder to get into and their high schools are worse in the city level

 

True, but there's more than one university. It's the same issue on the college level, all the kids want to go the higher ranking school.

 

There's no such thing as merit based admission when kids have a wide range of institutional challenges not based on merit. The people pushing merit based admission tend to be the kids who can't compete with their peers that have the same advantages that other kids don't. These people never refer to the discrimination other kids face only the discrimination of forcing them to compete against their peers.

 

Why not spread out the amount of "legacy" power instead of allowing a handful of powerful families stay powerful?