He wrote it as an Expose, readers saw it as a "How To" Guide

[Professor Emeritus]

I never said all the black students at Harvard are rich, but you're sticking to this claim that every asian there is this rich kid who had greater privilege than his peers in other minorities at Harvard.

You dismissed all the Black students at Harvard when you repeatedly implied that it didn't matter that 90% of the Black students would be wiped off the board if you had your way with SAT scores and enrollment.

So long as you keep ignoring the fact that NINETY PERCENT of the Black students at Harvard wouldn't be going there anymore under your system, then I'm going to keep running with the assumption that you don't actually give a shyt about them.

Also, privilege is FAR more than income or even wealth, but you keep ignoring that.

so you start talking about the financial profile of the asians WHO DIDN'T get in and then turn that into "so they are almost certainly coming from less privilege than the asians who are now getting it." your first point about the wealth of the rejected could possibly be true because maybe there was a reason harvard rejected those asians with great "stats" (maybe it was the hard quota and they said enough already), but you can't then make the claim that the asians who are now getting IN are wealthier than the blacks and hispanics who are getting in. there isn't anything to support that, in fact this refutes it:

The Harvard Crimson | Class of 2022 By the Numbers

Most Black Students at Harvard Are From High-Income Families

Literally nothing in those links refutes anything that I said.

Your links show that twice as many Asian students at Harvard come from $250,000+ backgrounds as Black students. And that's only 20% of the Black students - you didn't account for the other 80% at all. Since Asians are vastly disproportionately represented in the upper-middle income professions (about 35% of Asians are professionals while only 15% of Blacks are, not to mention disparities in the tech industry), it's almost certain that the income disparities are worse in the middle than at the high end.

But even by reducing it to income you've already messed up as privilege and income are NOT the same thing. For instance, the average Black family in America with a $100,000 income lives in a similar neighborhood to the average White family with only a $30,000 income. That's in large part because due to slavery, segregation, and discrimination, Black families in America have very, very little wealth. Even though the median White family only makes about 30-40% more than the median Black family in income, the median White family owns about 2000% more than the median Black family in wealth. And that divide is increase.

The median Asian family makes even more income than the median White family, but has somewhat less wealth. Still, the median Asian family has 10-12 times as much wealth as the median Black family and tends to live in significantly better neighborhoods with significantly better schools than the median Black family does. But you're ignoring all of that.

I read all 10 points. You think because I dismiss them for the majority of Harvard's black students compared to their asian classmates that I dismiss it for every black person in general and that's far from the truth. I'm just pointing out that Harvard isn't playing in that playground. Those kids who are largely affected by that are enrolling elsewhere.

So explain yourself. You think that Asian students at Harvard don't have any more privilege than Black students at Harvard when it comes to SATs. Yet Asian students not only double Black students now, they would become FORTY TIMES higher if you had your way. So if those Asian students aren't more privileged, then why are there these incredible disparities in test results? Are you suggesting that the Black students at Harvard are just stupider than the Asian kids? If you can't give me a concrete answer better than that then I'm going to tell you to fukk off.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

There's so much

going on in this thread now that it's all going to get lost if we don't get back to the main points.

I'm not going to reply to any of the previous shyt anymore. I'm only replying to anything that addresses these points.


#1. The SAT has no relation to what you actually do in college, adds no information to what you know about whether or not a student will graduate from college, and is considered bullshyt by a large number of people in the education field - to the point where among people who actually study the subject (as opposed to people who profit off of it or are required to be subject to it), it would be easy to say that a majority of people in education research think the SAT is a bunch of bullshyt.

#2. What the SAT does correlate to is wealth, privilege, and race. You are far less likely to get a good SAT score if you are Black, poor, go to a bad school, or have parents who weren't able to get a good education. SAT is much better at measuring what you already know about a student's privilege than it is at adding any new information about a student's ability.

#3. If SAT scores and other "objective" statistics became the end-all, then 90% of Black kids at Harvard would be knocked out, and similar shyt would happen at most elite schools, with the effect trickling all the way down. If you cape for that, then you are caping for those consequences.


I haven't seen anyone in this thread explain why the SAT should be used other than "it's objective". Well, shyt, so is a spelling bee or a pissing contest or the amount of money in your parents' bank account. For those who have this weird obsession with supposed objectivity, why is the SAT the measure we should use, and not any other random number?

I haven't seen anyone in this thread justify why they'd be okay with 90% of the Black kids at Harvard being uninvited. What if Harvard measured 40 times instead of SAT scores, and there were now more Black kids than Asian kids (along with an incredible uptick in Asian kids on track teams and private sprinting coaching across America). That would be objective too. Why would it be inferior to using worthless SAT scores do to the same thing?

The SAT is racially biased, class biased, irrelevant to college and provides no new information to admissions officers. It's just an easy shortcut for admissions offices and ranking programs to use in order to claim objectivity while cementing class and race biases. It deserves to be sent to the trash heap of history.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Article just came out in the Atlantic criticizing the EXACT kind of lazy equivalency that was being used in this thread in the EXACT same situation.

Elite Colleges Constantly Tell Low-Income Students That They Do Not Belong

The low-income students who do end up at these elite institutions are often treated as homogenous in both policy and the scholarly literature, as if they all navigate these schools in the same way. This is one of the most important contributions Jack has made with his research—disaggregating the experience of low-income students at elite colleges.

Jack describes two categories: the privileged poor and the doubly disadvantaged. The privileged poor are students who come from low-income backgrounds but attended wealthy private high schools, giving them a level of familiarity with and access to the social and cultural capital that tend to make people successful at elite universities. The doubly disadvantaged are students who arrive at these top institutions from neighborhood public schools, many of which are overcrowded and underfunded. They are schools where these students have excelled, but that are ill-equipped to give them the sociocultural tools necessary to understand the nuances of how these elite colleges operate. For example, without being explicitly told, how would students know what “office hours” are, and that they are encouraged to use them? Many low-income students attending these universities are unfamiliar with what Jack refers to as “the hidden curriculum,” those invisible rules and expectations that can lead some students to success while leaving others floundering. The book is full of examples like this, the sort of social capital that many students, faculty, and administrators take for granted.

Note - income is NOT enough to tell you who is privileged and who is not. Students with the same low incomes still come from very different schools, very different neighborhoods, and very different social networks. Black students in America overwhelmingly live in more disadvantaged neigbhorhoods, attend worse schools, have less family wealth, have less family educational background, and have fewer social connections to professionals and academics than East Asian students in America.



There's some important shyt in that article (some colleges are making low-income kids do janitorial work? ) but I'll skip to the conclusion:

The students described in Jack’s book are the students I was thinking of after news of the scandal broke. These low-income students—overwhelmingly students of color—arrive on elite-college campuses and are perpetually made to feel as if they don’t deserve to be there, whether it’s while cleaning a classmate’s bathroom, stocking up on nonperishable food for spring break, or overhearing an offhand comment about how their acceptance was predicated on the color of their skin, or the lower socioeconomic status of their family. Meanwhile, many wealthy students for all intents and purposes have their parents buy their way into these schools through private-school tuition, test prep, donations to colleges, and myriad other advantages. And they rarely experience the same level of skepticism as to whether they have “earned” their place.

I have seen this sense of frustration and disillusionment in the eyes of undergraduates I’ve worked with at Harvard, young people who over the course of four years endure the psychological toll of navigating a school environment that both implicitly and explicitly tells them that the only reason they were admitted was an undeserved handout, that their place was not earned but is instead an act of charity, that they were given someone else’s spot. But what this scandal demonstrates is that the very idea of our society—in the context of higher ed or otherwise—being a “meritocracy” was made up to justify and reify existing social hierarchies. It is not real. What is real is the advantages of wealth and race, which often combine to give people things that they have told themselves they deserve. What is real is that students who have done everything right are often the ones made to feel as if their place on campus is anything other than earned.

Exactly, exactly as I was saying, and the explicit context of the Harvard experience.

 

[Dorian Breh]

Is someone in this thread arguing that tests don't work for measuring merit?

Maybe yes , maybe no

But the solution is certainly not to just forget about trying to have a meritocracy

 

[Th3G3ntleman]

@Rhakim dropping big fukking facts out here.

Sometimes it's hard to hear the truth.

 

[New Jeruzalem Journalist]

Years ago (and I'm talking some while back) I was an SAT Tutor for The Princeton Review. I talked about it before on SOHH in KTL. The tutoring companies themselves teach their tutors and their students that the SAT has no bearing on intelligence or future success. I'm sure part of that is to help people overcome anxiety about taking the test, but the major reason they stress that to customers is because it's true.

They constantly reinforce in their courses that the SAT for all intents and purposes only measures how well you take the SAT.

 

[analog]

You are far less likely to get a good SAT score if you are Black, poor, go to a bad school, or have parents who weren't able to get a good education. SAT is much better at measuring what you already know about a student's privilege than it is at adding any new information about a student's ability.

What kind of assessment do you think would be more beneficial to the highlighted?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Is someone in this thread arguing that tests don't work for measuring merit?

Maybe yes , maybe no

But the solution is certainly not to just forget about trying to have a meritocracy

Yes, the fact that tests don't give you any additional information about merit has been well known in education circles for a long time.

I'm not sure who is trying to have a meritocracy. But anyone interested in that would probably be pouring a hell of a lot more resources into early education, because it's obvious that the current education system is far too unfair to be meritocratic. And SAT tests sure aren't going to get you there.

What kind of assessment do you think would be more beneficial to the highlighted?

Under the "College for all Texans" policy, most of their public schools automatically accept any student who graduates in the top 10% of their class, no matter what school they attended. Some of their universities accept any student who graduates in the top 25%.

That's obviously not a perfect system, but it's a very simple way to even out some of the worst biases. It ensures that some students have a chance no matter what neighborhood they grow up in, no matter what school they go to, and that they can take advantage of that opportunity in the most traditional, straightforward manner: by working hard in school and getting good grades.

Now of course that doesn't fix the fact that many local schools are doing a poor job of serving their kids. It doesn't take into account disparities that exist within the school itself. But it's a start.


I'm not actually a huge fan of grades in their current form - they are too competition-focused and giving just 1 grade for a class obscures more information than it provides. I prefer some form of competency-based or ipsative assessments. In the ideal system, I think that every class would end with a comprehensive report of what the student can do in comparison to what they could do before the class. For instance, perhaps your algebra class has 15 major skills that they want you to be able to perform by the end of the year. The report would show how well you could perform each of those skills at the beginning of the year and how well you could perform at the end. Thus anyone reading that report would be able to see exactly what you could do competently, and see whether you were the kind of person who picks up things or not (even if you might be starting further behind).

The ideal elite college admissions process would select a range of students whose achievement would most benefit both the school and the greater society, rather than requiring everyone to fit a cookie-cutter approach that arbitrarily advantages one or another group. Thus you would want students from a range of backgrounds, with a range of strengths, both students who were top achievers and students who might now yet be top achievers due to their disadvantages but who have showed great capacity for learning and self-improvement. It would be more of an art than a science - because there is NO existing science for measuring the worth of human beings or for dictating the ideal aims of a college admissions program. Of course it would be subjective - all college admissions processes are subjective, the very decision to use SAT scores is a subjective decision with zero objective rational supporting it.

I understand that some people here are distrustful of subjectivity. Unfortunately, it's the human condition. As I keep explaining over and over, anyone who thinks that mathematical equations or "objective standards" are more fair or any less subjective REALLY needs to read, "Weapons of Math Destruction" so they can learn from an insider how those algorithms and processes really work.