“Stuck in the distant past” is how I feel about a lot of the social discourse these days. Like, who are you arguing against? A Wall Street executive from 1986? A mid century literature professor?
Yes especially on the "brilliant autodidactical iconoclasts". It's not just that they're incredibly rare, but also that most of the people who fit that description don't become that until they've lived a lot longer and done more things than any 18-year old. Moreover, the few people who do fit that description at an early age *don't need college* as such. They may need a mentor or access to infrastructure, etc., but not a full-service curriculum. They wouldn't qualify for the description if they did need it.
The lottery idea I think is appealing because it gets college admissions offices out of the business of the exquisitely overtuned kind of social engineering that many of them are on the edge of and it acknowledges the arbitrariness of the selection process where two essentially identical students are considered and only one gets in.
Yeah, I can understand the psychological appeal of the lottery idea, to some degree; it's the difference between being unlucky and being deemed unworthy. I think it doesn't really work the way people want at scale, though. A lot of people talk about it like it'd improve the admissions chances of students at the 60th percentile, but a strict threshold-then-lottery system probably ends up running their odds to zero as they fall beneath the threshold.
I really think some people aren't thinking about it improving anybody's chances, just about it cutting the hubris involved in debating whether you want a left-handed piano player from Yellowknife who wants to study electrical engineering and Urdu or a stand-up comic who wants to study clinical psychology and ethnophilosophy from Gary, Indiana in terms of which "balances the class better". I'm pretty convinced that the need to pretend that selectivity at its extremes remains rationally defensible as meritocracy produces some pretty unsavory kinds of reasoning and some uncomfortable entitlements that force 18-year olds to pretend to be someone they really aren't.
I went to an elite college, and, back then and now, they were very up front about the probabilistic nature of the admissions process. Every year, they publish a matrix with one axis being SAT scores and one axis being grades and give the associated probability of admission. Since they had a lot more applicants than they could accept, the admissions department took all sorts of other things into account. They didn't have legacies or athletic admissions, but within each cell of the matrix your chance of admission was just that, a chance. One never if one was admitted or rejected becaues of a roll of the dice, a clever turn of phrase in an essay, awards, projects or summer jobs.
Most schools are much less selective than the elite schools. If you go to one of those choose your college web sites and look at schools across the board, a lot of them seem to take anyone with some minimal score or grade level. They probably provide a perfectly reasonable college education. The big difference is probably in the connections one makes which is why one might prefer an elite school or a regional powerhouse. They say European colleges have graduates, but American colleges have alumni, so those connections are a big part of the package.
If you look at elite schools like Harvard, they are highly selective. If they accept 10,000 out of 150,000 as stated in this article, that's 6-7%. When I applied, they accepted 8-9%, so Harvard has gotten a bit more selective in half a century but not to some outlandish extent. This is especially so considering that it was rare to apply to more than 5 or 6 colleges back then, and that small a number is considered unusual nowadays.
I agree on the elite college jocks. When I went to my elite school back in the late Pleistocene, most of the jocks could handle most of the curriculum just fine. And they certainly were more likely than the nerds to make good in business, and contribute to Dear Old Alma Mater. I might make an intellectual exception for the hockey players, however.
You could have also made the point that admitting a class at one of the selective colleges or universities is more than a little bit like casting a play. The college needs physics majors and dance majors, soccer players and music majors, and so on. In addition all Admissions Departments know certain patterns in high school seniors when they go to college. For example, as far as I know, it is generally true that approximately half of intended physics majors do not graduate with a physics degree. This applies to entirely credible intended physics majors with the right AP tests and courses. The transition from high school physics to college physics is a jump up, not a smooth transition.
The real problem with college is the society around it.
If we make college the ticket to middle-classdom (and elite colleges the ticket to upper-classdom) then lots of behaviours are going to get skewed. The fact that the Ivy League has not increased its intake in line with pop. growth then becomes a big problem.
Which is why you get people arguing that attending college is pure signalling/a status game.
The question is - how do we get companies to stop relying on college attendance as a generalized IQ test/a measurement of grit (and social connections/social know how).
I'd argue re-authorising IQ tests in employee selection would be a good first step...
“Stuck in the distant past” is how I feel about a lot of the social discourse these days. Like, who are you arguing against? A Wall Street executive from 1986? A mid century literature professor?
Yes especially on the "brilliant autodidactical iconoclasts". It's not just that they're incredibly rare, but also that most of the people who fit that description don't become that until they've lived a lot longer and done more things than any 18-year old. Moreover, the few people who do fit that description at an early age *don't need college* as such. They may need a mentor or access to infrastructure, etc., but not a full-service curriculum. They wouldn't qualify for the description if they did need it.
The lottery idea I think is appealing because it gets college admissions offices out of the business of the exquisitely overtuned kind of social engineering that many of them are on the edge of and it acknowledges the arbitrariness of the selection process where two essentially identical students are considered and only one gets in.
Yeah, I can understand the psychological appeal of the lottery idea, to some degree; it's the difference between being unlucky and being deemed unworthy. I think it doesn't really work the way people want at scale, though. A lot of people talk about it like it'd improve the admissions chances of students at the 60th percentile, but a strict threshold-then-lottery system probably ends up running their odds to zero as they fall beneath the threshold.
I really think some people aren't thinking about it improving anybody's chances, just about it cutting the hubris involved in debating whether you want a left-handed piano player from Yellowknife who wants to study electrical engineering and Urdu or a stand-up comic who wants to study clinical psychology and ethnophilosophy from Gary, Indiana in terms of which "balances the class better". I'm pretty convinced that the need to pretend that selectivity at its extremes remains rationally defensible as meritocracy produces some pretty unsavory kinds of reasoning and some uncomfortable entitlements that force 18-year olds to pretend to be someone they really aren't.
I went to an elite college, and, back then and now, they were very up front about the probabilistic nature of the admissions process. Every year, they publish a matrix with one axis being SAT scores and one axis being grades and give the associated probability of admission. Since they had a lot more applicants than they could accept, the admissions department took all sorts of other things into account. They didn't have legacies or athletic admissions, but within each cell of the matrix your chance of admission was just that, a chance. One never if one was admitted or rejected becaues of a roll of the dice, a clever turn of phrase in an essay, awards, projects or summer jobs.
Most schools are much less selective than the elite schools. If you go to one of those choose your college web sites and look at schools across the board, a lot of them seem to take anyone with some minimal score or grade level. They probably provide a perfectly reasonable college education. The big difference is probably in the connections one makes which is why one might prefer an elite school or a regional powerhouse. They say European colleges have graduates, but American colleges have alumni, so those connections are a big part of the package.
If you look at elite schools like Harvard, they are highly selective. If they accept 10,000 out of 150,000 as stated in this article, that's 6-7%. When I applied, they accepted 8-9%, so Harvard has gotten a bit more selective in half a century but not to some outlandish extent. This is especially so considering that it was rare to apply to more than 5 or 6 colleges back then, and that small a number is considered unusual nowadays.
FWIW, +1 on both points.
I agree on the elite college jocks. When I went to my elite school back in the late Pleistocene, most of the jocks could handle most of the curriculum just fine. And they certainly were more likely than the nerds to make good in business, and contribute to Dear Old Alma Mater. I might make an intellectual exception for the hockey players, however.
You could have also made the point that admitting a class at one of the selective colleges or universities is more than a little bit like casting a play. The college needs physics majors and dance majors, soccer players and music majors, and so on. In addition all Admissions Departments know certain patterns in high school seniors when they go to college. For example, as far as I know, it is generally true that approximately half of intended physics majors do not graduate with a physics degree. This applies to entirely credible intended physics majors with the right AP tests and courses. The transition from high school physics to college physics is a jump up, not a smooth transition.
The real problem with college is the society around it.
If we make college the ticket to middle-classdom (and elite colleges the ticket to upper-classdom) then lots of behaviours are going to get skewed. The fact that the Ivy League has not increased its intake in line with pop. growth then becomes a big problem.
Which is why you get people arguing that attending college is pure signalling/a status game.
The question is - how do we get companies to stop relying on college attendance as a generalized IQ test/a measurement of grit (and social connections/social know how).
I'd argue re-authorising IQ tests in employee selection would be a good first step...