Not EVERYONE has that view of Dartmouth. My dad is in the National Academy of Engineering and has quite the resume. When he heard that a local kid was going to Dartmouth, he asked, “Why in the world would he want to go there?” Cracked me up.
Fwiw I think Georgetown is “better” than Dartmouth. Well, at least equivalent.
Thanks! I think there are some people that are truly hung up on going to an Ivy or Stanford/MIT. I guess it depends on who you ask.
Dartmouth is quite different from HYP though.
Here is precisely what I mean about the schools losing their focus and have a bloated administrative bureaucracies.
Ohio State isn’t elite and all ot this is going on at an even higher cost at the elite schools. This is all nonsense and wasted money that should be eliminated by having admissions be transparent and based on merit. It’s absolutely ludicrous for OH St to be worrying about diversity and racial issues. It’s not the purpose or function of state schools funded by tax payors. The way out of this is for the SCOTUS to strike down all race based admissions and to enforce complete and total transparency to the process for any school that accepts any state or federal money. Anything else is illegal as the court will soon rule.
I think the SCOTUS will start off with a more narrow decision (deciding that Harvard’s methods are wrong but not ruling on the larger structure of college admissions because each school has differences in their criteria, but that would be enough to get most schools to proactively go towards something else). But I can already feel where this is going. When race is removed criteria for college admissions everywhere (and it will at some point in the near future), I can see new lawsuits popping up dealing with states with large amounts of minorities (in my state of Georgia, 1/3 of all high school graduates are African American but only around 8% of the students at state flagship UGA are African American). I can already see the argument around not having enough representation at some flagships so why would/should African American residents pay taxes to fund those schools? 50% of Mississippi high graduates are African American and 11% of the flagship school"s population is African American and would be the state that gets the lawsuit started. More liberal states will go towards using the Texas model (a guarantee of a certain percentage of the top students at all high schools who meet schools standardized testing criteria) which would automatically diversify (both by race and by income) many flagship state universities due to the segregated nature of schools throughout the nation. The Texas model will have plenty of court challenges over the next few years and it will be curious to see what happens with those legal proceedings.
@collegemomjam @SatchelSF With all due respect, for many majors and to many people, Georgetown is a more prestigious school (to me at least) than Darthmouth. I have no idea why your kid would get bewildered looks when she mentions she turned down Darthmouth to attend Georgetown. But I agree with your general point: If a kid is a motivated student, that kid will do well no matter which college he or she attends.
changethegame what you are discussing is a very different legal issue and with all due respect to GA and MS those are not key states in the education front. As long as the admission criteria are transparent, understandable, and based on objective criteria they will be legal the same way everyone doesn’t have a right to a jet pilot license, passing the bar, or the medical license exam unless they can pass the state exam.
Seems like a lawsuit in Mississippi would be better directed at the sorry state of K-12 education there (bad for white students, worse for black students). University of Mississippi frosh admission is not difficult, with automatic admission for Mississippi residents with 2.00 HS GPA / 18 ACT, 2.50 HS GPA or top 50% rank / 16 ACT, or 3.20 HS GPA: http://admissions.olemiss.edu/apply/freshman/
@ChangeTheGame you raise excellent points and I agree, there will be new legal challenges. I think the theme is that we can never make everyone happy.
Your point about the Texas system becoming more popular is interesting and makes sense. It might be the LEAST UNFAIR way because it gets at both race and income…and “neighborhood”…I’m not exactly familiar with how they handle it but are there seats left over that the applicants then compete for that don’t make the top 6%/score cut off? So would that give the kid from the fancy upscale town that just missed the cut off another fair chance to get in?
My thinking keeps changing and evolving on this complicated topic. So many posts make so much sense, and then someone raises an equally logical counter point. Such a complicated topic.
One thing that I consistently believe is that if we lose diversity on our top college campuses that that is not a good thing for this country.
Most Texas public universities do not get enough top 10% rank applicants to fill their classes, so they have additional ranges of automatic admission criteria. UT Austin is the exception, with the automatic admission limited to the top 6% to fill about 3/4 of the class. Applicants below the top 6%, along with all out-of-state and international applicants, must compete for the remaining 1/4 of the class. An important factor to note is that some majors are additionally competitive, so that admission (automatic or otherwise) to the school may not necessarily mean admission to a competitive major.
UT Austin also has a CAP program where some students rejected from frosh entry are offered the option of starting at another UT campus and then transferring to UT Austin contingent on a high enough college GPA.
Competition for class rank in some Texas high schools is said to be ferociously competitive and cutthroat. There are also stories of Texas high schools designing their GPA weighting to discount honors courses from outside their own school or district, to protect the incumbent students’ class ranks from strong students who transfer in from other schools or districts.
Thanks for that info @ucbalumnus
It seems like no matter what system is used there will be room to manipulate the “fairness”. Very interesting.
I can’t even imagine how cutthroat the top students must be trying to ensure their top 6% ranking if Austin is their top choice. How stressful. I know it’s a great school, though.
@ucbalumnus My own plan for fixing education (if I had money and power) would involve going down to the 3-5 year old students and investing a lot of money (biggest bang for the buck) and Mississippi would be near the top of the list (3 of my 4 Grandparents are/were Mississippi natives).
@collegemomjam I have also read a couple of stories like @ucbalumnus on how the hard cutoff to be an auto-admit into UT-Austin has turned some Texas schools into battlegrounds. Not sure if the Texas model is the right answer, but may be the answer that withstands legal challenges the best.
@SAY Sorry, you mentioned Ohio State, so my mind wandered to Flagship state schools. Even though I believe that Harvard will lose in court once this lawsuit climbs to the SCOTUS, I think that there are just enough loopholes in most laws/court rulings that will give them some wiggle room to diversify if that is what they chose. If you truly wanted Harvard to fall in line, Congress would need to threaten endowments with an escalating tax for all schools that do not meet some threshold of proof that race is not being used in college admissions. The color that really matters in all of this is green.
Now define “merit”.
Even with the usual measures, who is really more meritous out of three students who show similar high school grades in similar courses and similar test scores?
- Student from a stable high income family which is fully supportive of his/her college aspirations, and has the resources to support test preparation, extracurriculars, etc. with no issue, and is fully supported by teachers and counselors in schools.
- Student from an unstable (e.g. nasty divorce, frequent moves) poor family which does not have much in the way of resources to support anything beyond the basics (and sometimes not even the basics).
- Student from a middle income family who is from an ethnic group stereotyped as low achieving and has had to frequently fight teachers and school officials to get into honors courses and other programs for high achievers (not always successfully).
“Competition for class rank in some Texas high schools is said to be ferociously competitive and cutthroat”
It’s awful. Not what I’d want my kids high school experience to be.
ubcalumnus The rest of the world has no trouble defining merit. As you surely know all other countries give everyone the same test at around 15 and that alone determines merit. Neither does the Naval fighter program, medical training programs, legal firms picking partners, NFL,NBA, or many many other organizations. The stuff you list is exactly how we got into this mess to begin with. Anonymous unaccountable administrators with a totally monolithic ideology making decisions totally hidden from review based on race and other factors. . This is illegal and will be struck down very soon. All schools need not use identical admission systems but whatever system they use must be fair to all races. That is the federal law that is rigorously enforced to all employers and will now be properly enforced to any college that accepts federal or state money.
Simple IQ tests would go a long ways towards eliminating these sorts of fights. You can’t argue too much with a score. The worries about whether IQ tests are “culture fair” were always a red herring. Groups that performed relatively worse on IQ tests actually did best on those component tasks that were most culturally loaded. It can be even seen on achievement tests today. Look at any poorly performing school (say, schools with greatschools ratings of 4 or lower) and proficiency will almost invariably be higher on culturally loaded English tasks and lower on g-loaded mathematics tasks.
Stereotype threat has always been a bunch of hooey: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201512/is-stereotype-threat-overcooked-overstated-and-oversold
“Merit” == “intelligence + motivation.” No formulation is perfect, but as intelligence and drive are distributed more democratically than wealth and income, I think this approach would work better than what we have.
Intelligence is an individual attribute and is causally independent of SES above some extraordinarily low level (think prolonged starvation or lack of iodide). Poor kids can be brilliant and rich kids can be morons.
As for motivation, SES can, and should be, used in any evaluation of achievement. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t get carried away. The SES threshold for significant achievement has always been much lower than people imagine. Even more so today I’d imagine. After all, practically every kid has a Library of Alexandria right there for free on her iPhone.
Canada does not use the “one single test determines your university” system (high school grades are used; high school courses and grading are theoretically standardized within a province). Nor do the UK-based systems (they use standardized final exams by subject to grade high school course work, rather than one single test). China and India are not “all other countries”.
Obviously, a single testing sample at age 15 is not an optimal measure of merit, since some people may develop academic strength earlier or later, some who are strong at age 15 may not be as strong later, and performance on a high stakes test may not optimally predict performance on other academic work like research or projects. It is presumably used in places like China and India where other systems would have too much inconsistency and corruption. Even in those countries, there are demographic considerations that are commonly seen as unfair. In China, the allocation of seats by region favors the wealthy coastal regions; in India, there is “affirmative action” (with reservations or quotas) for commonly-discriminated-against lower caste people.
Of course, many employers make hiring decisions holistically, non-transparently, and often with criteria not particularly relevant to skill at doing the job (even the least transparent college admission process is more transparent than the hiring processes of many employers). Yes, there are non-discrimination laws, but it is difficult in an individual case to determine whether there is a violation, since there are so many other legal reasons that could be plausible explanations for a hiring or firing decision.
And any IQ test that is used for something important like college admissions will be the target of a test prep industry. You may like to believe that it is possible to design an IQ test free of environmental influences, but that is a dubious belief.
Of course, poor quality math instruction in school has a large effect on students’ performance on math tests.
^Maybe, avoid going down the IQ rabbit hole. That’s gotten this thread locked in the past.