No, because if you’re getting yourself into a situation in which legal defenses are required then it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you still did something wrong either way
Sorry if I sound like a jerk I’m just giving my opinion bluntly.
^I would really recommend learning more about our criminal justice system if you genuinely believe that it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor and that if you need a lawyer you definitely did something wrong.
And you should do that for your own well being, not even just because of this discussion.
College applications really typify sloppy social science. *We’re sure the data mean something, but we’re not sure what, but the public wants answers, so here’s our best guess. * This comment from the article says a lot.
“While not much research exists, one study in 2007 found no significant difference in campus crime when comparing schools that look at disciplinary and criminal backgrounds with others that do not, CCA reports.”
This is the kind of research that needs to be done :thoroughly: before you should use the data generated by these questions as part of the application process. Maybe that study predicts the larger findings. Maybe it’s a fluke. But if schools really don’t have the evidence, then they’re just crossing their fingers and whistling in the dark.
There are good reasons for suspecting a relationship between felony convictions as a kid and bad behavior in the future. There are equally compelling reasons for thinking many of those convictions are rigged.
Which means we have a hypothesis to be tested. So let’s test it. Seems easy enough.
@skyoverme I’m not sure how your post #16 bears on what I wrote about Portland’s requirements. If you translate Portland’s law to higher education this is what would happen: College X would offer conditional acceptances to applicants 1 through N and ask for criminal history. At that point College X could withdraw the offer of admission to any of those but it would need to explain how the new piece of information is relevant.
Your reference to GPA and SAT scores not being justified is factually true but irrelevant here because those factors are considered prior to conditional acceptance.
With the caveat that education is a complex issue and there’s rarely one answer to such problems, a few suggestions:
-Buy every HS junior SAT and ACT prep books. Even if we assume the gov’t gets no volume discount, this would cost about $150/student, or about $500 million nationwide - about 0.1% of our defense budget, and less than Americans spend on bubble gum each year. Test prep books - lest we forget - do as much as tutoring to raise scores, at a fraction of the cost.
-Pay for up to two sittings of each test per student, as well as a junior-year PSAT and PLAN. This would reduce the gap created by retakes, which low-income applicants may not be able to afford but the affluent certainly can, and improve students’ preparation before they take a single “live” test. A lot of people aren’t aware that they qualify for waivers, and this deters them from retaking the SAT/ACT. Many can’t afford/don’t know about the PSAT and PLAN. This would cost more than the prep books - perhaps $2 billion a year - but the expense is still minuscule in proportion to overall government spending.
-Fund programs that provide books to low-income students. One such program, in Illinois, improved low-income kids’ reading skills drastically (the state legislature took away its funding the next year - go figure).
-Reduce the resource gap between schools in affluent areas and those in run-down neighborhoods by uncoupling school funding from local property taxes.
Yes, low-income students still won’t have access to $3,000 tutors. Certainly, they won’t have hundreds of books at home. And these things will make a difference. But if the gap between a student’s score without prep books, tutoring, practice tests, retakes, etc. and his/her “optimum” score is 400 points (SAT) or 4 points (ACT), prep books and a retake can easily reduce that disparity by half.
Maybe colleges that don’t want to ask this question just don’t want to be sued if/when a student is attacked or raped by a another student with a criminal record (whatever cover they use to justify why they want to stop asking this question). People sue for all sorts of things these days.
I assume you are volunteering your kids first to be in the test. I will pass on my kids being part of a some felon-based social experiment.
This actually makes no sense. Ignorance of someone’s background because one decides not to ask can easily be determined as highly negligent, especially when one is selling “campus safety” to parents and students.
Imagine this - a growing preschool decides to hire new assistants to help the teachers. And, in the name of social fairness, decides not to ask these questions. The school then ends up with a rampant child molester who because the events took place as a preteen juvenile was never required to register as a sex offender. What do you think the response of parents whose children are molested would be, to sue or not to sue? Of course, the school would be negligent for not asking such questions on its employment form.
I see no difference if a college did the same and had roomed felons with regular students and something happens - the school is negligent for not properly screening.
@awcntdb Let’s reread the quote at the start of post #22.
In other words, there already are schools that don’t ask this question - but almost no one has bothered to compare data. We don’t need more schools to stop asking the question, we need people to crunch the numbers we already have.
@hebegebe it’s not as simple as rich people are smarter therefore they have smarter kids:
http://www.thewire.com/politics/2009/08/why-are-rich-kids-smarter/27131/
@awcntdb: unless you don’t ask the question because of diversity.
Places like New York City have already banned the use of such questions for certain jobs because of the high incarceration rates of Blacks. Once it is law, there is no exposure to negligence.
I have a dream that my three children will one day fill out a college app and not be asked questions about the color of their skin, but rather about the content of their character.
@iwannabe_Brown,
I remember hearing about that book “Intelligence and How to Get It”, and even considered purchasing it a couple of years ago. What stopped me was this analysis by James Lee, published in 2010 in the peer-reviewed academic journal “Personality and Individual Differences”: http://laplab.ucsd.edu/articles2/Lee2010.pdf
This is a scholarly journal, but in that context, the written words are akin to a no-holds-barred cage match. Using the well-known MISTRA twins study, the heritability of ‘g’ of twins raised apart is estimated at 0.77 (very high). Nisbett claims this is biased because the homes for the twins were similar, but Lee strongly disagrees because the correlation due to SES was found to be 0.00.
^That is good evidence. It would be interesting to see a twin study like MISTRA on adolescents and SAT scores directly, rather than trying to infer what IQs of 40 year olds mean for SAT scores. I don’t have access to too many psychology journals. If you know of any peer reviewed studies of WAIS and SAT scores I’d love love to see them to get a better sense of the correlation. I’m sure it’s above 0.5, but would be curious to know how close it is to 1. It would also be interesting to see if the test prep boon has had any appreciable impact on potential correlation (or lack there of) with SES since the MISTRA was published in 1990.
For the record. I don’t know if PID sends its book reviews out for peer review (please let me know if you have experience with the journal). Not all peer reviewed journals send non primary research articles out for peer review - speaking from my own experience as one of the authors of an editorial in a peer reviewed journal.
I’m quite familiar with scholarly journals (having published multiple times in them). I’m still not quite sure what this means though.
@LOUKYDAD I too wish for that, but until the “not judging people by the color of their skin” applies to the world outside of college admissions, it will exist in college admissions. Schools that do not practice holistic admissions already do not do this to my knowledge though.
Sorry for taking us off on a tangent. Can we return to the question of why a kid (regardless of race or SES) who stole 4 xbox games in MA (not a felony) is safe for a college campus while the one who stole 5 xbox games in MA (a felony) is not?
Is someone suggesting that there is a direct correlation between the students with a blemish on their record and their decision to accept/reject? Is a suspension for being involved in a minor prank the same as something more egregious?
Taking the devil’s advocate approach, with the discussion about safety on campus permeating several threads, why should schools remove this potential piece of data? The reason for the blemish on the record is more important, IMO than the fact that hey may have had an arrest or suspension in and of itself.
@iwannabe_Brown - do you wish for that? For people to be judged on the content of their character? Yet you don’t any institution to be able to ask questions about someone’s past behavior? Explain.
The real comparison is not between someone who stole four xbox games and someone who stole five. It is with another kid who would never imagine the right to take someone else’s property without paying for it. Someone who gets a job and works until they have the money to buy one xbox game. Of these three kids, there is only one of the three I want my kid sharing a room with frankly. And I don’t care what color any of the three are.
The line between misdemeanor petty theft and felony grand theft is arbitrary and different in every state so the 4 vs. 5 Xbox argument isn’t very meaningful.
Seems to me what makes sense is to have these questions on the form and have a space for the applicant to give details, so the admissions committee can distinguish among “I shared my lunch with my friend” and “I stole a bottle of Coke when I was 12” and “I knocked over a liquor store two years ago but I’ve turned my life around now, really!” School discipline is usually for pretty trivial stuff, but it’s not irrelevant if an applicant has a criminal record.
@Requin I think that’s the point @iwannabe_Brown is trying to make; the misdemeanor/felony line is rather meaningless, so why does it have an impact on whether a student be considered dangerous?
It is not a valid argument.
Every application has an area to explain things.
If your explanation for checking the box is “stole 4 xbox games” or “stole 5 xbox games” or “beat a person senseless because they scratched my new 6 series BMW”, the adcoms can take your explanation into account and judge for themselves.
Personally, I agree with keeping these questions. I understand the reasoning behind the move to ban them too, however. There’s a lot of evidence that SAT scores and such boxes are holding back poor students of color, which I can believe-- but I think in this case you can’t separate race from income as in this context they are fused together, and AA isn’t really doing anything for these kids.
Freshman year I was harassed by a group of boys and it got pretty bad, and it went on their records. I believe they dropped out soon after, but I feel a bit better knowing they’re going to pay the price for what they’d done-- they had low grades and a criminal background, so they’re not gonna be in school anywhere near me come college.